A Test for Ambiguity... Tewtally Pwned

I’m reading Zwicky and Sadock’s (1973) paper on “Ambiguity Tests and How to Fail Them” for a paper on the ontology of senses (of linguistic expressions) that I’m working on.* They discuss different types of arguments for or against a sentence (or a crucial expression in the sentence) being ambiguous. One type, called “inconstancy under substitution” caught my eye. Fully spelled out, I think inconstancy under substitution arguments work something like this:

1. F is synonymous with G / F is a hypernym of G / G is a hypernym of F.
2. “… F …” has distinct understandings p and q.
3. “… G …” has p, but not q / “… G …” has an understanding that is acceptable if p, but no understanding that is acceptable if q / “… G …” has an understanding that is acceptable only if p, but none that is acceptable only if q.
4. Therefore, “… F …” is ambiguous between p and q.

Some comments: as it stands, the conclusion doesn’t logically follow from the premises. It’s hard to say what the implicit premise is that makes the conclusion seem warranted. At any rate, I don’t want to question the validity of this line of argument here. The big problem is antecedently establishing the first premise. Intuitively, the fact that substitution of G for F does not transform the possible understandings in the appropriate way** is evidence for the semantic relation not obtaining between F and G. To take one of the relations, it seems that we come to call F and G synonyms because of their intersubstitutability across diverse sentential and conversational contexts. Granted, of course, that intersubstitutability can fail in certain sorts of contexts without telling against the synonymy of the two terms; the argument from inconstancy of substitution (which does not involve reference to conversational contexts) works precisely when the sentential context is of such a sort. But we need to be able to identify those contexts prior to making the judgment that F and G are synonymous. But this entails that we can already recognize that, in the context quoted in the argument, F is ambiguous between the reading with which G is synonymous and some more idiomatic reading. So it seems that in order for us to establish the soundness of the premises of an argument from inconstancy of substitution, we must already be in a position to know that the conclusion is true.
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* - The first paper I’ve started to work on since graduating from Bard. Kind of exciting.
** - The appropriate way when F and G are synonymous would be that “… F …” can be understood precisely in all the ways that “… G …” can. The appropriate way when F is a hypernym of G would be that there is a certain one-to-one correspondence between the understandings of “… F …” and the understandings of “… G …”, such that an understanding of the latter is acceptable only when the corresponding understanding of the former is acceptable, or something like that.

Happy Birthday!

Yom huledet sameach, Israel!

Today, in the Jewish calendar, is the 60th anniversary of the birth of the modern Jewish state of Israel. It is a very happy day in Israel, immediately following Yom Hazikaron, Israel's Memorial Day. It is a very happy day, as well, for Jews the world over who think that the state of Israel should exist.

Did anybody else find it strange that, on Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut, the New York Times should be airing this video? Israel's treatment of its own Arab citizens is troubling in many respects, and the Times' video is nuanced and, as far as I can tell, not inaccurate. But wouldn't it be outrageous if the Times covered the Fourth of July with, say, a story about our shabby treatment of the Native Americans, or the history of our government's indifference to the intimidation of non-white voters? Isn't that exactly what's going on here? For everything a season, guys.

The Particularity of Love

Now and again I hear or read something saying that we should or do love what we love “in its particularity.” This sometimes gets the implicitly metaphysical gloss that we should love people, especially, just for “who they are” and sometimes gets the explicitly metaphysical gloss that the reason why we love whom and what we love is that it possesses its own haecceity
. Since I don’t believe in haecceities yet, and since I don’t know what to do with “who they are” in this context, I never put much stock in this particularity idea.

Harry Frankfurt has cleared it up for me:

“The significance to the lover of what he loves is not that his beloved is an instance or exemplar… For a person who wants simply to help the sick or the poor, it would make perfectly good sense to choose his beneficiaries randomly from among those who are sick or poor enough to qualify. It does not matter who in particular the needy persons are. Since he does not really care about any of them as such, they are entirely acceptable substitutes for each other. The situation of a lover is very different. There can be no equivalent substitute for his beloved… It cannot possibly be all the same to the lover whether he is devoting himself disinterestedly to what he actually does love or – no matter how similar it might be – to something else instead.” (The Reasons of Love, 44)

I’m still not sure whether the particularity idea is true, but now I know roughly what would count as a counterexample to it.

My question here is: How does the particularity idea sit with the fact that there are such things as what we love about individuals? It sure seems that, if I love certain things about an individual, then, if the individual were not to have those things I love about it (or if I were to come to believe that the individual did not have those things), I would not love the individual. When I tell my girlfriend what I love about her – how funny she is, how affectionate she is – part of what I am telling her is why, in part, I have come to love her. My beloved’s having what I love about it, or my believing that it has what I love about it, is a necessary condition for my having come to love it, if not also for my continuing to love it.

But while this is a necessary condition, a consequence of the particularity idea is that it can’t be sufficient. What we love about an individual is not alone what makes us love it, either in fact or as a matter of duty. For what we love about individuals are properties, and properties are typically things that numerically distinct individuals can share. But if I need not, either in fact or as a matter of duty, love a numerically distinct qualitative duplicate of my beloved, then what I love about my beloved – certain properties of the sort shared by its doppelganger – is neither what causes me nor what obligates me to love it.

Vonnegut Pro Dancing, Contra Blogging

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, 62

Confucius, Music, Character

Therefore, the superior man tries to create harmony in the human heart, by a rediscovery of human nature, and tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails, and the people’s minds are led towards the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appearance of a great nation. Character is the backbone of our human nature, and music is the flowering of character.

- Confucius (? - Can't find the source)

Is Existence a First-Order Property?

I think I’ve found a not-so-bad argument for construing existence as a first-order property. Here goes:

Begin with the principle that first-order properties are those things in virtue of which a sentence of the form “x is not identical to y” is true, for some substitution of individual-symbols for “x” and “y”. So existence is a first-order property if some such statement is true solely in virtue of the truth of a corresponding sentence of the form “x exists” or “x does not exist” – or, if you like, corresponding sentences of the form “there is a z, such that x = z” and “there is no z, such that x = z.” Let c1 =def the bottom tennis ball in a certain canister that can contain as many as three tennis balls; let c2 =def the middle tennis ball in that same canister; let c3 =def the ball immediately above c1 in the canister. Now suppose that there are actually only two balls in the canister. Then c3 is above c1, but c2 is not, since c2 does not exist. It seems that ~(c2 = c3).

I would suggest that this is the case just because c2 does not exist. Supporting this contention is the apparent fact that if c2 did exist (i.e. if there were some ball, such that that ball is the middle ball in the canister; if there were some ball, such that that ball is c2), then it would be the case that c2 = c3. But if ~(c2 = c3) just because c2 does not exist, then by our initial principle about first-order properties, existence is a first-order property.

Does this work? Am I missing something? I don’t really understand the necessity of identity. Is some abuse of that principle at work here? Or is my beginning principle about first-order properties false? Or is it actually not the case that ~(c2 = c3) – say, because “~(c2 = c3)” lacks a truth-value?
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Update:

In a comment at the Maverick's, Ockham, writes: "You cannot say 'c2 =def the middle tennis ball in that same canister' and then say 'but c2 does not exist'" Here's my response, which is too long and too irrelevant to the discussion of the Maverick's post to leave on his blog.

I suppose that, in classic FOL, you can't introduce a term through a definite description that doesn't refer. FOL aside, though, do you mean to say that this is incoherent in natural English? "The middle ball in that same canister doesn't exist" does sound strange to me. Admittedly, it sounds more natural to say "There is no middle ball in the canister," which we might formalize "~(Ex)(Middle ball in the canister(x))." It doesn’t sound unnatural to introduce a proper name through that definite description, however. Nor does it sound unnatural to me to say “c2 doesn’t exist” (even though “the middle ball in the canister” is the definition of “c2”), just the same way it doesn’t sound unnatural to say that “Pegasus doesn’t exist.” The big difference between “c2” and “Pegasus” seems to be that “c2” was obviously introduced by a definite description, whereas “Pegasus” was not obviously so introduced. I’m not sure that this difference is enough to make “c2 doesn’t exist” incoherent and “Pegasus doesn’t exist” coherent. Still, we might imagine situations in which a term like "c2" is introduced – say, by a group of people who believe, incorrectly, that there are three balls in the canister – otherwise than by the definite description “the middle ball in the canister.” (Briefly: maybe the group could use a function from canisters to the middle ball in the canister. Maybe they could just start using “c2” to (try to) refer to what they believe to be the middle ball by stating facts that would be true of such a ball, were it to exist.) In any event, I’m not sure that “c2 doesn’t exist” is incoherent, and if it is, we can use other stories about how something like “c2” comes to have a certain meaning, and then tell a story similar to the one I tell about ~(c2 = c3).

Davidson, Belief

I think there might be something like an inconsistency in Davidson’s theories of meaning and belief. Consider the following set of claims, all of which, I think, Davidson has to accept:

1. Intentional indeterminism: the apparatus of folk-psychology always underdetermines the total set of beliefs and desires that we attribute to an intentional system. The non-psychological facts and the commitments of psychology as such (i.e. the common commitments of any psychological theory in virtue of which the theory is psychological) underdetermine – inductively, deductively, and abductively – what beliefs and desires an intentional system has.
2. General agreement: in general, folk that are equally well-informed about an intentional system in non-psychological terms agree, in the individual cases, both on what beliefs and desires the system has, and how to determine further what beliefs and desires the system has.
3. We must explain (2) in terms of the commonly-held beliefs of the folk.
4. These beliefs are not among the basic commitments of psychology as such. (From (1) and (2).)
5. Facts about commonly-held beliefs that determine the evidential procedures governing the proper application of a word (like “believes) are among the facts that constitute, in part, the meaning of that word. (I take this to be one of the reasons that Davidson says that meaning and belief are so closely related. I also take it to be a consequence of most varieties of semantic holism.)
6. Facts about the meaning of “believes” are among the basic commitments of psychology as such.

But then, from (3), (5), and (6), it seems we can derive the conclusion that the facts that explain (2) are facts about the meaning of “believes,” and so among the basic commitments of psychology as such. This is immediately contrary to (4).

I think Davidson might get out of this by denying (3), but it still seems that the sort of meta-semantics underlying (5) is going to make it difficult to say that the commonality that explains (2) is not, in part, constitutive of the meaning of “believes.”