Stephen Neale

Sets out Kurt Gödel's slingshot argument. The original argument—or, at least, the premisses of the argument that Neale attributes to Gödel—can be found in a fleeting footnote to a discussion of the relationship between Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions and Theory of Facts. Usually each theory is viewed as quite independent of the other, but Gödel argues otherwise: that the viability of the latter depends upon the viability of the former. Neale summarizes Gödel's standpoint as follows: ‘if a true sentence stands for a fact, then in order to avoid the collapse of all facts into one, the friend of facts must give up either an intuitive and straightforward Fregean Principle of Composition or the idea that definite descriptions are expressions that purport to stand for things.’ The sections of the chapter are: Elimination ; Facts and Descriptions; Identities in the Matrix; and The Eleatic One.

Introduces the criticisms put forward by philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty to the idea that one thing might represent another: that thoughts, utterances, and inscriptions are said to have content by virtue of their power to represent reality; and that those that do the job accurately are true, they correspond to the facts, or mirror reality—they are representations of reality. The author then outlines the deductive proof that he will present in the book to show that Davidson's and Rorty's criticisms are unfounded. The content of the proof is based on the work of Kurt Gödel and W. V. Quine, and demonstrates conclusively that any supposedly non‐truth‐functional operation must satisfy an exacting logical condition in order to avoid collapsing into a truth‐function, and any theory of facts, states of affairs, situations, or propositions must satisfy a corresponding condition if such entities are not to collapse into a unity. The three main sections of the chapter: examine the case against representations made by Davidson and Rorty, including Davidson's notorious argument against facts; discuss Rorty's critique of representational philosophy ; and consider collapsing arguments that discredit the existence of facts, as put forward by Gottlob Frege, and developed by Alonzo Church, Quine, Davidson, and Gödel. The last section of the chapter outlines the structure of the book.

Discusses the philosophy of Donald Davidson, who appears to have brought the slingshot argument to the current prominence within philosophical discussions. It examines Davidson's semantic programme, the relation between semantics and ontology that he champions, his arguments against facts and the scheme–content distinction, and the ways in which he and Richard Rorty assail the notion of representation. The chapter is arranged in nine parts: Introductory Remarks; Meaning and Truth; Reference and Ontology; Content and Other Complications; Facts and Correspondence; The Great Fact; Scheme and Content; Realism and Objectivity; and Representation.

Examines the work of Bertrand Russell. It looks at Russell's idea that true sentences stand for facts and the philosophical and formal details of his Theory of Facts and Theory of Descriptions, both of which Neale describes as being poorly understood to this day. The six sections of the chapter are: Facts and their Parts; Representing Russellian Facts; The Theory of Descriptions; Abbreviation; Scope; Quantification and Notation. An appendix to the book looks further at Russell's definition of descriptions as incomplete symbols.

Chs. 6 and 7 set out and clean the formal tools that are needed in the remaining chapters to prove that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. Clarifies what is meant by such terms as ‘extensions’, ‘extensionality’ and ‘scope’, and the next separates various inference principles. The four sections of the chapter are: Extensions and Sentence Connectives; Scope; Extensional and Non‐Extensional Connectives; and Intensional Connectives.

With the Descriptive Constraint discussed in Ch. 9 at hand, Ch. 11 examines diverse theories of facts with a view to establishing how viable they are, and then turns to claims about the semantics of causal statements that have been used to motivate ontologies of facts and events. Neale makes the point that there is considerable confusion in the literature on the matter of whether causal statements are extensional, but shows that once the clarifications effected in earlier chapters are brought to bear, almost all of the confusion can be eradicated and decisive results obtained. There are still some extensional causal statements, and these can be delimited on the basis of their superficial grammatical forms, but there are other causal statements for which it is, as far as Neale can ascertain, still an open question whether extensional or non‐extensional treatments are to be preferred, much turning on the position taken on the overall shape of a semantic theory. If non‐extensional treatments prove appealing, the resulting theories will have to satisfy the strictures imposed by the Descriptive Constraint. The six sections of the chapter are: Identity Connectives; Fact Identity; Events; Events and Causes; Facts and Causes; and Fact Identity Again.

Looks at the work of Gottlob Frege on truth and composition. It investigates Frege's idea that a sentence refers to a truth‐value, his Principle of Composition, and his abandonment of what Donald Davidson calls ‘semantic innocence’. Neale explains what kinds of slingshotian considerations prevented Frege from accepting facts as denotations of sentences and made him see sentences rather as names of truth‐values. The three sections of the chapter are: Reference and Composition; Innocence Abandoned; and The Reference of a Sentence.

Chs. 7 set out and clean the formal tools that are needed in the remaining chapters to prove that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The previous chapter clarified what is meant by such terms as ‘extensions’, ‘extensionality’ and ‘scope’, and this one separates various inference principles common in extensional logic. The six sections of the chapter are: Introductory Remarks; A Principle of Substitutivity for Material Equivalents; A Principle of Substitutivity for Singular Terms; A Principle of Substitutivity for Logical Equivalents; An Inference Principle Involving ‘Exportation’; and A Principle of Substitutivity for Definite Descriptions.

Chs. 9 convert the two basic forms of slingshot argument—one used by Alonzo Church, W. V. Quine, and Donald Davidson, the other by Kurt Gödel—into knock‐down deductive proofs that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The proofs are agnostic on key semantic issues; in particular, they assume no particular account of reference and do not even assume that sentences have references. Using the same procedure as in Chs. 8 and 9 shows that a slingshot argument engendered by Gödel's suggestions can be converted into a proof that delivers an exacting constraint on non‐extensional discourse—the Descriptive Constraint—and that is more general than anything Gödel appears to have had in mind. The proof of this constraint is constructed without appeal to logical equivalences, without assuming that a semantic theory must treat sentences as having references, without presupposing anything contentious about the semantics of singular terms, and without commitment to any particular semantics for definite descriptions. A constraint on facts, situations, states of affairs, and propositions—indeed on anything that is expressed or represented sententially—drops out as a trivial consequence of a constraint on non‐extensional discourse. The three sections of the chapter are: Principles of Conversion for Descriptions; Gödel's Proof in Quinean Format; and A Stronger Slingshot?

Chs. 8 and 9 convert the two basic forms of slingshot argument—one used by Alonzo Church, W. V. Quine, and Donald Davidson, the other by Kurt Gödel—into knock‐down deductive proofs that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The proofs are agnostic on key semantic issues; in particular, they assume no particular account of reference and do not even assume that sentences have references. Using this procedure, Ch. 8 shows that cleaned‐up versions of the slingshot arguments used by Davidson, Church, and Quine demonstrate theses weaker than those their authors were seeking—the impossibility of facts and non‐truth‐functional connectives. This is primarily because the arguments depend upon logical equivalences and theories of definite descriptions that must satisfy certain semantic conditions if the aforementioned logical equivalences are to obtain. The four sections of the chapter are: Introductory Remarks; The Quinean Strategy; An Incomplete Connective Proof; and A Complete Connective Proof.

This is one of a series of articles in which I examine errors that philosophers of language may be led to make if already prone to exaggerating the rôle compositional semantics can play in explaining how we communicate, whether by expressing propositions with our words or by merely implying them. In the present article, I am concerned less with “pragmatic contributions” to the propositions we express—contributions some philosophers seem rather desperate to deny the existence or ubiquity of—than I am with certain types of traps that those who exaggerate the rôle of semantic convention and underestimate the rôle of pragmatic inference are apt to fall into.

When philosophers talk about descriptions, usually they have in mind singular definite descriptions such as ‘the finest Greek poet’ or ‘the positive square root of nine’, phrases formed with the definite article ‘the’. English also contains indefinite descriptions such as ‘a fine Greek poet’ or ‘a square root of nine’, phrases formed with the indefinite article ‘a’ (or ‘an’); and demonstrative descriptions (also known as complex demonstratives) such as ‘this Greek poet’ and ‘that tall woman’, formed with the demonstrative articles ‘this’ and ‘that’. Following the custom in philosophy, in this chapter often we use ‘description’ as short for ‘definite description’; and following the custom in linguistics, often we use ‘definite’, ‘indefinite’, and ‘demonstrative’ as shorthand nouns. For the most part we focus on definite and indefinites, although a few words about demonstratives are called for. At the centre of debates about descriptions is the matter of whether they are devices of reference or of predication (simple or higher-order), and much discussion focuses on how various proposals are to be incorporated into broader theories of the semantics of natural language. But philosophical interest goes beyond the confines of linguistics, logic, and the philosophy of language because choices made about the semantics of descriptions have repercussions elsewhere, particularly in epistemology and metaphysics. A simple match of form and meaning appears to fail.1 First, many occurrences of expressions of both forms ‘the φ’ and ‘a φ’ appear to be used to talk about particular individuals. Consider (1).

Names, descriptions, and demonstratives raise well-known logical, ontological, and epistemological problems. Perhaps less well known, amongst philosophers at least, are the ways in which some of these problems not only recur with pronouns but also cross-cut further problems exposed by the study in generative linguistics of morpho-syntactic constraints on interpretation. These problems will be my primary concern here, but I want to address them within a general picture of interpretation that is required if wires are not to be crossed. That picture will be sketched in sections 3 and 4; subsequent sections will focus on pronouns and binding, drawing heavily on what has preceded.

SummaryIt is a mistake to think that Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation reduces to the claim that théories are under‐determined by evidence. The theory of meaning is subject to an indeterminacy that is qualitatively different from the under‐determination of scientific théories. However, there is no reason to believe that the indeterminacy thesis extends beyond translation and meaning, and hence no construal of the thesis prevents one from being a realist about grammars, construed as partial théories of mind