A Notional Worlds Approach to Confusion

Mind & Language, Vol. 22 No. 2 April 2007, pp. 150–172.© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

A Notional Worlds Approach to Confusion KRISTA LAWLOR

Abstract : People often become confused, mistaking one thing for another, or taking two things to be the same. How should we assign semantic values to confused statements? Recently, philosophers have taken a pessimistic view of confusion, arguing that understanding confused belief demands signifi cant departure from our normal interpretive practice. I argue for optimism. Our semantic treatment of confusion can be a lot like our semantic treatment of empty names. Surprisingly, perhaps, the resulting semantics lets us keep in place more of our everyday interpretive practices in the face of confused belief.

1. Confusion: A Problem for Our Interpretive Practice

People often become confused, mistaking one thing for another, or taking two things to be the same. For example: David sees his wife ’ s keys lying on the hall table, and mistaking them for his own, picks them up and pockets them. Later, at his offi ce door, we fi nd him frustrated, saying, ‘ My key isn ’ t working … it worked yesterday … ’

Some questions arise about how to interpret David ’ s beliefs and inferences: Does David believe of his key and just it, that it doesn ’ t open the door? Or does he believe both of the key he picked up , that it doesn ’ t work, and of his key that it is the key he picked up? David is confused, and as a result, it ’ s hard to say just what is the object of his belief, when he says ‘ My key isn ’ t working. ’

How do we understand a confused person ’ s beliefs and inferences? With confused belief, we face a problem for our normal interpretive practice. That practice has two key components: (i) we evaluate a person ’ s belief for truth, and (ii) we evaluate a person ’ s inferences for validity, where validity is understood to involve the preservation of truth. This much is familiar, but it is worth spending a moment on a few details, so that we can see better the sort of problem that confusion presents. Regarding (i), the idea is that, given the sort of thing belief is, understanding a belief requires evaluating it as true or false. The way we evaluate a belief, in order to understand it, is this: we take it that beliefs are the sort of thing that both denote and attribute; so we assign semantic values corresponding to what ’ s denoted and what ’ s attributed to it by the belief, thereby determining the content or truth conditions of the belief; then we can ask if the world meets those conditions. The basic idea behind this fi rst component of our interpretive practice is that referential semantics

This paper was written with support from the American Council of Learned Societies Charles A. Ryskamp research fellowship, for which I am very grateful.

Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, Bldg 90 Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. Email: [email protected]

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© 2007 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

A Notional Worlds Approach to Confusion

enables our understanding. Regarding (ii) the idea is that evaluating a person ’ s reasoning as rational is in part a matter of seeing whether it preserves truth. The basic idea behind the second component of our interpretive practice is that the rational person seeks as much as possible when making inferences to conserve truth in forming new beliefs. Finally, it is also worth noting that our practice seems to assume some connection between (i) and (ii), between being rational and having beliefs that are interpretable in light of truth and falsity. Independently of any philosophical theory of just what the connection might be, as interpreters of each other, we routinely try to understand apparently rational behavior and inference in terms of beliefs, because we can understand beliefs in terms of takings-true.

The problem confusion presents is this. With a confused person, it ’ s diffi cult even to start the process of interpretation. How can we assign semantic values to the confused person ’ s utterances and beliefs, so as to assess them for truth? Just what is it David is talking or thinking of, when he says ‘ My key doesn ’ t work? ’ . It ’ s hard to say. 1 And yet, we can ’ t simply write off the confused person as irrational. It seems David is behaving reasonably, in light of his mistake — although we may have trouble deciding just what his mistake is. The existence of confused, though clearly rational, individuals seems to put tension on the connection between rationality and belief that lies at the heart of our interpretive practice.

Until recently, very little has been said to address the problem of confusion. And when, recently, confusion has become the focus of inquiry, philosophers have been largely pessimistic. By that I mean, philosophers have either imagined that understanding a confused person will demand a signifi cant departure from our normal interpretive practice (say, demanding the use of different validity criteria, devised expressly for the confused) 2 , or more radically, that the existence of confusion forces us to abandon altogether some aspect of the representational theory of the mind. 3

I am more optimistic about confusion. By that I mean, I believe we can retain our normal interpretive practice, even with the confused person. Specifi cally, we can retain referential semantics in evaluating belief, and retain truth-based validity criteria in evaluating the inferences of the confused. I don ’ t deny we need semantic innovation, in order to handle confusion. We do. My aim in this paper is to show how new semantic tools make it possible to address the problem of confusion without overthrowing our normal ways of understanding people.

In what follows, I will start by canvassing the pessimistic side of things. Then in subsequent sections, I ’ ll suggest a way we can handle the problem of confusion.

1 Just because it ’ s hard to say, doesn ’ t mean it ’ s impossible, of course. However, some argue that there is no fact of the matter about what the confused person is thinking of ( Camp 1988, 2002 ); others argue that a single confused thing is the subject matter of confused person ’ s thought, and so our ontology must expand to include amalgams of confused items ( Millikan, 2000 ).

2 This is true of Camp (2002) , whose book is a milestone on the subject of confusion. For reasons I will explain, I think supervaluational approaches to confusion are also pessimistic.

3 For instance Millikan (2000) argues that the possibility of confused belief forces us give up on the idea of modes of presentation . The story here is a long one, and I won ’ t consider this line of argument, but see my (2005).

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2. Confusion and Indeterminacy of Reference

One approach to the problem of confusion is to assimilate confusion and indeterminacy of reference, and then use existing methods for tackling indeterminacy — namely, the method of supervaluation . In this section, I ’ ll briefl y sketch this approach, then say why it ’ s pessimistic.

Start with the phenomenon of indeterminacy of reference. Indeterminacy of reference is a central issue in the philosophy of science, especially in our efforts to make sense of theory change. A familiar example: we can imagine Newton once used the term ‘ mass ’ , saying, ‘ To accelerate a body, more force is needed if the mass of the body is greater ’ . The question is, did Newton speak truly? Since we now distinguish proper mass and relativistic mass , where Newton did not, what should we say? Hartry Field (1973) argues compellingly that there is no fact of the matter about what Newton referred to with his uses of ‘ mass ’ . This creates a problem: on a referentialist semantics, the truth of what Newton says depends on the thing or kind he refers to with ‘ mass ’ having the property or properties predicated of it. If there is no fact of the matter about what Newton referred to, when he said and wrote his physical theories, none of his statements using ‘ mass ’ was true. This, Field notes, is diffi cult to swallow: it certainly seems Newton can have said lots of true things about mass, even if he did not conceive, as we now do, of two sorts of mass.

Field famously suggests a supervaluational approach to the problem of indeterminacy: very roughly, we let the truth of utterances like Newton ’ s be settled by considering whether the imprecision in his statement mattered: if what he said would be true on either way of disambiguating ‘ mass ’ , then what he said was true, plain and simple.

It is very natural to extend the supervaluational approach to cases of confusion, and let the truth of a confused belief or utterance depend on whether it would be true on relevant ways of disambiguating it. Here is an example of confusion to illustrate (the example is Camp ’ s (2002 , p. 27ff)): Imagine that Fred buys an ant colony. In it are two big ants, ant A and ant B, and many small ants. Fred believes he has a colony with only one big ant, so when he sees his fi rst big ant, he dubs him ‘ Charley ’ . Fred subsequently observes ant A and ant B (though never together, we might imagine) and says things like ‘ Charley ’ s had lunch ’ , and ‘ Charley is tired this morning ’ . So the question arises, what to say about the truth or falsity of Fred ’ s statements. Fred says:

(1) Charley is a big ant.

Is (1) true? False? Does it not have any truth-value? We can borrow the solution Field offers for the indeterminacy case, and assign

a truth-value through supervaluation. First, we broaden our concept of reference to include partial reference ; when Fred uses the name ‘ Charley ’ it partially refers to ant A, and partially refers to ant B. Next, we let the truth of utterances like (1) be

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settled by considering whether (1) is true or false on any way of disambiguating ‘ Charley ’ by assigning partial references. If (1) is true on any way of disambiguating ‘ Charley ’ by assigning a partial referent, then what Fred says is true plain and simple. Similarly, if (1) is false on any way of disambiguating ‘ Charley ’ , then (1) is false plain and simple; and if (1) is neither, then his statement lacks a truth value. In the event, (1) is true, since both ant A and ant B are big ants.

Recently, there have been some notable arguments against supervaluing in the case of confusion. 4 For my purposes here, however, what I want to emphasize is just that the supervaluation approach is pessimistic about employing our normal interpretive practice with the confused person.

Here is why the supervaluational semantic approach is pessimistic. In supervaluing, we give up understanding the confused belief. Understanding a belief involves grasping its truth conditions, as they are determined by what the belief denotes and attributes. Admittedly, in supervaluing we assign a confused belief a truth value, and in that sense we evaluate it . But the evaluation is not made on the basis of what the confused belief denotes. How great a departure from our normal interpretive practice is this? To introduce the notion of partial denotation would seem to preserve something of the normal method of truth evaluation, after all. In response, I suggest the departure from normal practice is signifi cant, as Fred ’ s case shows. Fred ’ s ontological commitments involve one big ant ( ‘ Charley ’ ), not two. Our assignment of truth and falsity to Fred ’ s beliefs rests on our ontology, not Fred ’ s. We evaluate Fred ’ s beliefs for how far they might lead us astray, by our lights. In a very clear sense we give up on understanding Fred, in favor of using him, we might say, as an instrument (and a not-too-well-calibrated one at that), for detecting the facts as we understand them. The supervaluational approach is pessimistic about interpretation in just this sense.

Pursuing supervaluation means conceding that, in the case of a confused person, an ineliminable tension arises between the components of our normal interpretive practice. In using a supervaluational semantics we retain the ability to evaluate inferences using familiar validity criteria — that is, in terms of preservation of truth — and that is all to the good. But we do so at the cost of understanding the confused person ’ s belief.

Consequently, if we had another way around the problem of confusion, one that preserved more of our interpretive practice than supervaluation does, that would be desirable.

In section 4, I will present just such an account of confusion — one that allows us to understand more about the confused person ’ s belief. Before I present my account, though, I want to consider a very general argument for pessimism, an argument that underwrites an alternative approach to confusion that involves still more radical departure from our normal interpretive practice. That is Joseph Camp ’ s (2002) ‘ calibration argument ’ .

4 In the next section I ’ ll consider one very important argument — namely Camp ’ s (2002) ‘ calibration argument ’ . See also Frost-Arnold (2005) .

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3. Camp ’ s Calibration Argument

In his book Camp extensively reviews the range of options open for interpreting confused belief. The pros and cons of each interpretative attempt don ’ t matter, however, in light of a powerful argument Camp develops, meant to demonstrate once and for all that no interpretation of the confused person ’ s beliefs can be given in terms of truth and reference. Camp ’ s ‘ calibration argument ’ , which I ’ ll consider in this section, has as its upshot that we cannot evaluate a confused person ’ s beliefs for truth, not if we take the confused person to be rational, anyway.

Camp actually offers a few versions of the calibration argument. I focus here on the one he describes as having the most sharply stated premises (p. 75). The basic idea behind Camp ’ s argument is that, if we assign truth-values to a confused person ’ s statements, so as to evaluate her reasoning, we won ’ t be able to credit her as reasoning well at all. And since we think confusion is one thing and irrationality another, we ’ re forced to not evaluate confused statements as true or false at all. (Supervaluing is misguided, on Camp ’ s view, as is any other semantics for confused thought that ’ s built on notions of truth and reference.)

Let us build toward Camp ’ s argument with an illustrative case. Suppose Fred is worried that Charley is ill. He consults a book about ants, and discovers that there are three chief symptoms of head colds in ants. Making numerous observations, Fred sees that Charley has all the symptoms:

(a) Charley is sniffl ing. (b) Charley is grumpy. (c) Charley will not eat a raisin.

Fred concludes that it is very likely that:

(d) Charley has a cold.

Now, Camp argues, if we assign truth-values to Fred ’ s statements, as supervaluational semantics permits us to, we can also assign probabilities to Fred ’ s statements. So we can say the following: Fred ’ s subjective probability of (d) is very high, and his conditional subjective probability of (d) given (a) and (b) and (c) is likewise very high. But if we compare this conditional subjective probability with the objective conditional probability of (d) given (a) and (b) and (c), we ’ ll fi nd they diverge, perhaps dramatically so. Here is why: Fred ’ s observations of ant A and ant B are what ground his claims (a)-(c). But ant A and ant B are not perfectly correlated with respect to any of the properties ‘ sniffl ing ’ , ‘ grumpy ’ , ‘ avoiding raisins ’ and ‘ having a cold ’ . It ’ s very likely then, that the occasions where ant A has the symptoms and the cold are not exactly the same occasions where ant B has the symptoms and the cold. So it ’ s likely that both ant A and ant B have colds together on fewer occasions than when they both have symptoms . It takes their both having colds together to make (d) true (supervaluationally), but it only takes both having

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symptoms to make (a)-(c) true. 5 So the objective probability of (d) given (a) and (b) and (c) will be less than the subjective conditional probability that Fred assigns it.

In such a case, Camp says, Fred is ‘ poorly calibrated ’ with respect to conditional probabilities: his ‘ judgment of the weight of the evidence (a), (b), and (c) for the conclusion is wrong (high) ’ (p. 77). But, Camp continues, saying Fred is poorly calibrated amounts to violating a special sort of charity constraint on interpretation:

When a reasoner is poorly calibrated with respect to conditional probabilities, when she makes judgments of the weight of evidence that do not square with actual conditional likelihoods, we are accustomed to explain the fact by pointing to some defect in her methods of inquiry. She must be reasoning in ways we do not approve; … But this is exactly what we must not do with Fred, as long as we are urging, charitably, that he is ‘ reasoning with the best of us ’ ( Camp, 2002 , p. 77).

If we are to be ‘ inferentially charitable ’ then, and see Fred ’ s inferences as conforming to canons of rationality we recognize, we must avoid the attribution of ‘ poor calibration ’ , Camp argues. How to do this? The only way, Camp urges, is to resist evaluating Fred ’ s statements for truth in the fi rst place:

But as long as we truth-value Fred ’ s Charley sentences, Fred will turn out poorly calibrated with respect to conditional probabilities. A modus tollens here give us the conclusion that, as charitably minded confusion-attributers, we ought never to truth-value Fred ’ s ‘ Charley ’ sentences. This radical surgery will save Fred from being poorly calibrated … (p. 77).

Here is a re-statement of Camp ’ s calibration argument:

1. If we assign truth-values to Fred ’ s utterances, then they will also have objective probabilities, or real likelihoods.

2. But if we assign truth-values, Fred ’ s subjective probabilities will likely pull far from these objective likelihoods. (In the case considered Fred ’ s subjective conditional probabilities pull far from the objective conditional probabilities.) Fred will be poorly calibrated with respect to conditional probabilities.

3. If Fred is poorly calibrated with respect to conditional probabilities, ‘ what is judged to be likely conditional upon the evidence may not in fact be

5 In point of fact, Camp here relies on a supervaluational assumption, so his argument is not as fully general as he takes it to be. I will let this point pass, however, since there are other problems with the argument I want to focus on.

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that likely, conditional upon that very evidence ’ , and this sort of judgment only occurs in one whose reasoning practices we disapprove of.

4. We don ’ t disapprove of Fred ’ s reasoning. 5. So Fred can ’ t be poorly calibrated 6. So, since we are committed to inferential charity concerning Fred

(that is, committed to approving of his reasoning), we must not assign truth-values to Fred ’ s sentences.

As a consequence of this argument, Camp sees an ineliminable tension between the two components of our interpretive practice, when it comes to confused belief. His own solution is to accept this state of things, and abandon interpreting the confused person ’ s confused beliefs as being about facts. Camp goes on to develop an alternative set of ‘ epistemic-semantic ’ tools for evaluating belief: briefl y, Camp claims we should evaluate belief not for truth and falsity, but for profi tability and costliness; and we should evaluate inference not for truth-preservation, but for preservation of profi tability and avoidance of unprofi tability. 6

Camp himself is under no illusion about how radical this position is — he calls it ‘ radical surgery ’ . But he takes it that the calibration argument leaves us no alternative.

Everything depends on the strength of the calibration argument, then. If the argument doesn ’ t hold, we ’ ll have every reason to continue to seek means of interpreting confused people as we do everyone else — i.e. evaluating their beliefs for truth, and their inferences for truth-preservation.

So let ’ s look at the calibration argument more closely. Responding to the calibration argument, the defender of our normal interpretive

practice will do well to question premise 3. After all, we might say, the confused person is poorly calibrated! Poor calibration, everyone might agree, does have the result that ‘ what is judged to be likely conditional upon the evidence may not in fact be that likely, conditional upon that very evidence ’ . But does this sort of judgment only occur in people whose reasoning practices we disapprove of? Fred himself might serve as our counter-example.

Put another way, while we may be ‘ accustomed ’ to explaining such judgments by pointing to bad reasoning, or bad methods of inquiry, that hardly means we ‘ must ’ always explain them this way. We might explain Fred ’ s making his judgment another way, in a way consistent with our approving of his reasoning. For instance, we might say that, although Fred reasons about likelihoods well enough, his confusion of ant A with ant B has him weighing observations that are not really evidence for the conclusion. He hasn ’ t made an error of weighing, then, but he has made an error in taking those observations to be the ones to weigh. This is as we might expect, given Fred has confused ant A with ant B.

6 This is a very rough take on Camp ’ s semantics (p. 145 ff), which is modeled on Nuel Belnap ’ s four-valued logic.

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We undertake a burden in saying this, of course; we must distinguish Fred ’ s making his erroneous judgment of the weight of evidence from someone whose reasoning we really do disapprove of. Imagine for instance, Edward, who is not confused about the ants, but follows a deviant conditionalization rule in weighing evidence. We can imagine Edward might thereby arrive at the same erroneous judgment as Fred does, taking it to be just as likely as Fred does that one of the ants has a cold. Edward ’ s judgment of the likelihood of one of the ants having a cold is the same as Fred ’ s judgment about Charley, but delivered by a different rule for weighing the evidence. Our burden is to distinguish Fred ’ s good reasoning about likelihoods from Edward ’ s bad reasoning.

Camp will reply by saying that this burden cannot be successfully taken up. It only seems that we might distinguish good reasoning that happens to result in bad judgments, from bad reasoning that results in bad judgments. In the end, any attempt to make this distinction will invariably have us engaged in special pleading on behalf of our favored reasoner. 7

Here we arrive at an interesting problem; let ’ s call it ‘ the problem of special pleading ’ . Very roughly, the problem is to say, in a principled way, what makes the confused reasoner ’ s inference good, even though it produces the same judgments a shoddy reasoner produces. I will sharpen the problem in subsequent sections, and it will be my focus when I offer my positive account of the semantics of confusion.

For now, returning to the dispute between Camp and the defender of standard interpretive practice, this much can be said: No knock-out blow has been delivered. The calibration argument is not conclusive as it stands. Everything depends on further argument about whether the defender of standard interpretive practice can address the problem of special pleading.

To recap: We ’ ve seen two approaches to confusion, both of which depart in some signifi cant ways from our normal interpretive practice. Each approach fi nds it impossible to retain more of our normal practice, when interpreting confused people ’ s beliefs and inferences.

I think it ’ s possible to be more optimistic. In the next sections, I will argue that we can develop an alternative semantic theory for confusion. Borrowing tools from recent work on empty names, I will develop a way to interpret confused statements, while respecting the rationality of the confused person. The basic idea will be to interpret a confused person in light of the notional contents of her beliefs. Moreover, armed with the idea of notional contents, we can address the challenge to our interpretive practice posed by the problem of special pleading.

7 See especially Camp ’ s discussion (pp. 53–4) of a similar rescue effort regarding Fred ’ s deductive reasoning — he clearly feels some contempt for the idea: ‘ It is not all that far removed from arguing that some reasoner is thoroughly rational because his is too stupid to notice fallacies ’.

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4. Confusion and Emptiness

To motivate the view I will advocate, let us return briefl y to referentialism. Briefl y, the referentialist says that names and other referring terms are tags for individuals — they carry no descriptive content with them, in making their semantic contributions to the propositions expressed with their aid. All the name contributes to the proposition expressed is the object that the name denotes. When a term, such as ‘ mass ’ , fails to denote, it fails to make a semantic contribution, and a proposition never gets expressed by an utterance in which the term fi gures. The most natural thing to say, when denotation is confused, is that the belief or utterance has no truth value. From a referentialist perspective, that is, confusion results in emptiness. There is nothing answering to ‘ Charley ’ , after all, so when Fred says ‘ Charley is a big ant ’ what he says isn ’ t true or false. In a strict sense, what he ’ s said is, nothing.

This answer, admittedly, sounds implausible. (And, some might feel, uncharitable.) We face a basic implausibility in saying that Fred ’ s belief has no truth-value. 8 Nonetheless, I believe there are many things to be said in favor of taking a confused statement to be empty, in the sense that it expresses no proposition.

First, in a straightforward referentialist framework, this is a natural answer to give; and, although I won ’ t recap the claims that can be made for referentialism here, referentialism ’ s advantages in a wide range of other cases give us reason to pursue the idea of treating confused statements as empty. 9 Second, more importantly, taking confused statements to be empty lets us better capture some of our intuitions about confused statements. When Fred says:

(1) Charley is a big ant,

it is natural to feel uncomfortable saying exactly what it is that Fred believes. And when asked if (1) is true or not, we feel the impulse to reply along the lines, ‘ Well, I know why he says that, because both the ants he ’ s been seeing are big … but it ’ s hard to say ‘ true ’ or ‘ false ’ — there is no ‘ Charley ’ after all ’ . Treating confused statements as empty allows us to make straightforward sense of these reactions.

Finally, and most importantly, once we say that a confused statement expresses no proposition, we ‘ ll fi nd we can actually be optimistic about confusion — that is,

8 Here there ’ s a parallel with the indeterminacy case: It seems implausible to say of Newton, for instance, that his beliefs about mass were empty. After all, Newton knew as much as anyone did about mass; and when he claimed, ‘ To accelerate a body, more force is needed if the mass of the body is greater ’ , we feel his belief surely was not empty. The implausibility of supposing Newton ’ s belief empty is why Field rejects the straightforward referentialist semantics in favor of supervaluation. A similar implausibility attaches to a diagnosis of emptiness in the case of confusion. What I say to dispel the implausibility in the confusion case should apply to the indeterminacy case as well, but that is a topic for another occasion.

9 See Perry (2001) for extensive defense.

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we can retain more of our normal interpretive practice when confronting confused belief. This may seem counter-intuitive. However, what I aim to show is that, in taking confused statements to be empty, the problems that confusion presents are very like the problems that empty names present, and that is a good thing, because we have some new and effective tools for dealing with empty names. I will argue below that, when we use these tools on confused beliefs, we ’ ll fi nd we can actually be optimistic about confusion: we can understand a great deal about the confused belief , and use what we understand to assess the confused person ’ s reasoning . This result is surprising, I realize. It ’ ll be my aim to explain how seeing confused beliefs as empty holds the key to being more optimistic.

Below, I will sketch a referentialist treatment of empty names, and show how we might expand upon it to develop a semantics for confusion. Obviously, the fi rst burden we assume is to address the apparent implausibilities of taking confused beliefs to be empty. It seems after all that Fred says something with his talk of ‘ Charley ’ ; and it seems we might correct Fred using ‘ Charley ’ talk, too, saying for instance, ‘ Charley isn ’ t a single ant ’ , or some such. So my task in this section (4.1-4.3) will be both to develop the theory and address implausibility worries. Then in section 5, I show how our new semantic tools allow us to resolve the problem of confusion in an optimistic way.

4.1 Problem(s) For Referentialism: No-reference, Co-reference, Confused-reference

I want to be clear about how serious the challenge is for my view. There are actually several problems that arise if we take confused beliefs to be referentially empty. Consider a confused statement of Fred ’ s, one he might express by saying:

(3) Charley is tired today.

If we suppose that propositions are structured, with individuals and properties as constituents, the referentialist says of (3) that it expresses no proposition, since there is no individual named ‘ Charley ’ . If we suppose that propositions are collections of possible worlds (or functions from worlds to truth-values), the referentialist says of (3) that it expresses a necessarily false proposition. But it does seem that Fred, studying his ant colony, believes something. His cognitive life regarding his ants is not empty, or full of necessary falsehoods (Charley might have existed after all).

To say then, as the referentialist does, that (3) expresses no proposition or a necessarily false proposition, is unintuitive. At least it presents a prima facie problem, to square what the referentialist says with the idea that Fred believes something about his big ants. And something importantly different than were he to believe a thing like some squares are round , or what have you.

A second problem: it seems that we are able to clarify for Fred what he ’ s been confused about, explaining his mistake to him using his own terms. For instance,

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(4) Charley is not a single ant,

seems to us a good way of starting a clarifying explanation; it seems to be true. But how can (4) be true? There ’ s no proposition here, either, if ‘ Charley ’ names nothing. The referentialist needs to account for the fact that (4) says something true.

And fi nally, a third problem to add to the referentialist ’ s woes: two people could be under the same misapprehension about Charley. Fred and Ted both make the same observations and say:

(5) Charley ’ s had a lot of sleep today.

It seems they are in agreement about something; they ’ ve both said the same thing. It ’ s not enough to claim that Fred and Ted have said the same in virtue of uttering a necessary falsehood. A referentialist owes a story here about same-saying.

Below I provide some answers a referentialist can give to such problems as arise from confusion. In building the account, I draw heavily from John Perry ’ s (2001) work on empty names. 10

4.2 The Truth of Confusion-dispelling Claims

Let ’ s start by considering what we can say about the truth of (4) above. In treating empty names, Perry borrows an idea of Donnellan ’ s. The idea is that a statement might have as its truth condition, the condition that the name uttered has a particular sort of history. So in treating a case like ‘ Pegasus does not exist ’ , we say the following:

If N is a proper name that has been used in predicative statements with the intention to refer to some individual, then ‘ N does not exist ’ is true if and only if the history of those uses ends in a block.

By a ‘ block ’ , we can understand Donnellan to mean a moment in the history of the use of term where events occur ‘ that preclude any referent from being identifi ed ’ . ( Perry, 2001 , p. 123)

Before describing how all this will help us say something about the truth of our confusion-dispelling statement (4), we also need a brief excursus into Perry ’ s account of notion-networks.

The basic structure of notion-networks is fairly easily stated: upon perceiving an object, one forms an idea of it, a notion . One ’ s perceptions can be indirect, for

10 In Perry ’ s terms, referentialism already confronts the problem of ‘ no reference ’ (explaining how statements with empty names can have cognitive signifi cance) and the problem of ‘ co-reference ’ (explaining how statements with different but co-referring names can have different cognitive signifi cance). So we are just adding to this list of problems that the referentialist must solve, the problem of ‘ confused reference. ’

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instance when one reads about the great physicist, Oppenheimer, and thereby forms a notion of him. As one gathers information about the object, ideas of its properties are attached to the notion and the information is stored in a fi le . Sometimes, one opens a temporary notion, a buffer , to hold information until one can sort out which notion it belongs with and fi le it appropriately. A notion and its corresponding fi le has an origin if there is a single item that is responsible for the perception that caused the notion. If there is no such item, say the perception was illusory, then the notion has no origin. Alternatively, the notion might have been ‘ freely created ’ , as for instance Conan Doyle ’ s ‘ Sherlock Holmes ’ notion was; in which case, again we have a notion with no origin. A notion-network is the total inter-subjectively maintained set of notions and fi les about a particular individual. Many people ’ s notions of Holmes fi gure in the total network on Holmes. Likewise, the Oppenheimer network.

Now we are in a position to say something about our fi rst problem, namely, that when one says:

(4) Charley is not a single big ant,

to clear up Fred ’ s confusion, it seems one expresses something true. First, keeping in parallel with the referentialist treatment of empty names, we give the truth conditions for statements like (4) above:

If N is a proper name that has been used in predicative statements with the intention to refer to some individual, then ‘ N is not a single F ’ is true if the history of those uses ends in a specifi c kind of block, B.

And second, we add to our list of blocks, a block of kind B, the kind that arises in cases like Fred ’ s being confused about Charley. 11

What kind of block arises in Fred ’ s use of ‘ Charley ’ ? The most straightforward answer is that the block is one where a misrecognition of one ant produces a fi le with information from both: For instance, that Fred fi rst perceives a big ant, ant A say, and opens a fi le on him with a Charley-notion. We might imagine that Fred perceives ant B next, and opens a buffer, which then feeds information into his Charley-fi le. We will then say that since the causal source of the notion is its origin, ant A is the origin of Fred ’ s Charley notion (and the origin of the Charley-fi le), and all subsequent identifi cations of ant B as Charley involve a misrecognition.

We might have a lingering concern over this straightforward answer, however, in light of the very special circumstances involved in Fred ’ s case of confusion. On the way of proceeding sketched above, it would seem to be that there are uses of

11 Note that I here drop Donnellan ’ s ‘ only if ’ from the statement of truth conditions. We need to allow for uses of expressions of the form ‘ N is not a single F ’ to state known facts about corporate entities (for instance ‘ IBM is not a person ’ ), where confusion has no role. Thanks to an anonymous journal referee for pointing out such cases.

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‘ Charley ’ to name ant A which are in order, since ant A is the origin of Fred ’ s notion, while every use of ‘ Charley ’ to name ant B is not in order, since ant B is not the origin. In cases of confusion like the one we ’ re considering, this might seem an awkward result; Fred, we might feel, is confusing ant A and ant B equally , and his confusion would seem to effect both uses of Charley to name ant A and ant B equally.

Certainly, Fred ’ s confusion is a special kind of misrecognition. Ant A and ant B are so alike, and information from each of them, we ’ re led to imagine, contributes about equally to Fred ’ s ‘ Charley ’ fi le (i.e. each of ant A and ant B are tied for being the ‘ dominant source ’ as Evans (1982) calls it, of Fred ’ s big-ant thoughts). Moreover, both ants A and B are about equally well described by the fi le contents. Finally, mere chance, it would seem, has led to Fred ’ s seeing ant A fi rst (say), and so to ant A being the causal origin of his Charley-notion. In this (very special) sort of misrecognition case, we might feel that there is in a fairly clear sense a tie for being the origin of the fi le — that is, it could as well have been ant B that was the origin of Fred ’ s existing Charley-fi le. In this sort of case, we might feel tempted to say that we have two candidates for origin. If we pursue this line of thought, we won ’ t diagnose a simple ‘ misrecognition block ’ . Instead, we ’ ll say that, when there are two equally good candidates for origin, there is no single item that is the origin. And if there is no single item that is the origin, there is no origin (origins being unique). We can call the resulting block, a confusion block . This sort of block arises when there are two candidate origins (for a perception or a notion), both of which thereby feed information into a single fi le. 12

On either way of going, we can state the truth conditions for:

(4) Charley is not a single ant.

(4) is true if the history of uses of ‘ Charley ’ ends in a misrecognition block or a confusion block. If we ’ re moved by the ruminations above, we will say Fred indeed has a fi le with two candidate origins, and so no origin, the history of Fred ’ s uses of ‘ Charley ’ ends in a confusion block. If we ’ re not moved by the ruminations, we ’ ll say it ends in simple misrecognition block. In either case, the statement (4) is true. (4) is something we say, and say truly, in helping Fred to understand the nature of his confusion. 13

12 Lot of interesting things can happen to equally good origin candidates over time. Evans ’ Madagascar case seems to be one where our use over time favors one of two equally good candidates for origin. In such cases, Perry will say that the fi le is ‘ co-opted ’ (2001, p. 145ff).

13 A worry arises here about assigning truth conditions Donellan-style to confusion-dispelling claims: how can we preserve semantic innocence and compositionality for our language if we do? This is a good worry, but a very large one, since it proves very diffi cult to preserve both semantic innocence and compositionality, even in cases where we ’ re not trying for semantics of confused belief. In response, perhaps we should tolerate the weakening of what both semantic innocence and compositionality are thought to require (see Powell, 2002 ), but that is a topic for another day.

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4.3 Notional Content

Our second problem is to explain the fact that Fred ’ s cognitive life is not empty, and that when he has beliefs ‘ about ’ Charley, he has beliefs about something, even if no proposition is expressed by his ‘ Charley ’ statements. In brief, the question is, can we say more about such statements of Fred ’ s as:


or:

(3) Charley is tired today,

beyond just saying that they express no proposition (or a necessarily false one)? In answer, we will distinguish, as Perry does, several kinds of truth conditional

content a statement or belief can have. Perry argues that statements containing proper names can convey several different kinds of truth conditional content. Among the kinds of content a statement has are (i) its offi cial or ‘ referential ’ content — that is the ‘ singular ’ proposition that contains the individual referred to by the proper name; referential content captures ‘ what is said ’ or ‘ the proposition expressed ’ , as opposed to what is conversationally implied, by an utterance; (ii) its ‘ refl exive ’ content — this sort of content is determined when we specify truth conditions for an utterance by making reference to the utterance itself; and (iii) its ‘ intentional ’ content — this sort of content is determined when we specify truth conditions for an utterance by making reference to the origin of the notion that supports the utterance.

To handle our remaining problems of confused reference, we ’ ll make heavy use of this third sort of content, what Perry calls ‘ intentional ’ content. A couple of preliminaries: fi rst, in what follows, I make a small terminological change, and use the term ‘ notional ’ content instead of ‘ intentional ’ content. The term better captures the idea that a belief or statement can have associated with it distinct propositions which owe their life to the notions in play. Second, a word about the rationale for discerning additional levels of truth conditional contents for statements: An statement or belief makes various demands on the world, if it is to be true. We can think of the various kinds of truth conditional content an utterance or belief has as arising from various kinds of demand an statement or belief makes on the world, demands that must be met if the statement is to be true. The notional content of a statement or belief encodes a certain kind of demand on the world: specifi cally, notional content places a demand on the origin of the notion that supports the relevant beliefs and statements.

Let ’ s use our case to illustrate. The notion-network that fi gures in our account of Fred ’ s statement (1) is fairly simple. The network was begun when Fred saw ant A (or ant B) formed a Charley notion and started using the name ‘ Charley ’ . Let ’ s call this network, N c . Fred hasn ’ t had much chance yet to tell a lot of people about Charley and his escapades. Maybe he ’ s mentioned Charley and the ant colony to his neighbors and family, each of whom have formed their own Charley notions, and stored a few items of news about him. Each has a Charley notion and a fi le

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with some properties such as being Fred ’ s big ant , or being the ant who almost escaped once , and that ’ s about all.

Now let ’ s hold fi xed all such facts about this network, except to let facts about the network ’ s origin (or lack thereof) go unspecifi ed. Then we ask, given the facts about the network, what else has to be true for Fred ’ s statements to be true. For instance, given the facts about N c , when Fred says:


one way the world has to be for his utterance to be true is that the little network of beliefs, N c , traces back to a single item, and that single item is a big ant.

The important point is this: what we get with notional content is a resource for explaining why (1) is not thoroughly devoid of substance, and why when Fred thinks or says (1) he still has something going on in his cognitive life. When we think that Fred believes something in believing (1), we think that Fred has some attributable commitments . Often, as theorists, we simply equate Fred ’ s attributable commitments with the referential level of content . But we needn ’ t. Notional content also captures attributable commitments. Consider again the statement (1). It has the notional content:

(1n) That N c has an origin, and he is a big ant.

This proposition is (contingently) false, of course. What we get with the notional content (1n) is another take on Fred ’ s commitments. Fred thinks that there is one big ant, the object of his ministrations, the source of his observations and memories. (1n) does the job of capturing these commitments of Fred ’ s. That is, Fred ’ s statements about Charley being a big ant do place substantive demands upon the world. And the notional content captures these: (1n) places the demand that the origin of the Charley notion-network be a real, existing, big ant. So, despite the fact that (1) involves a name that doesn ’ t refer to anything, and has no ‘ referential content ’ , a person who believes (1) believes something . His belief carries notional content as well — and our recognition of this is what has us saying that the confused person ’ s belief isn ’ t entirely devoid of substance. 14

A second reason to take notional content to capture the substance of Fred ’ s commitments is this. One job content has is helping us to classify a believer ’ s states in ways that make possible prediction and explanation (through intentional psychological generalization) of the person ’ s actions. And using notional content, we can classify Fred ’ s cognitive states into types that will make possible the explanation and prediction of Fred ’ s behavior. When we think that Fred believes

14 Note that Fred might not even have the concept of a notion-network, in order to make (1n) properly attributable as the notional content of his statement. (1n) nonetheless lets us capture Fred ’ s (tacit) commitments, in believing as he does.

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something in believing (1), this owes in part to our tacitly understanding as much — that is, we understand that Fred ’ s cognitive states are susceptible to explanation and prediction, despite his beliefs being referentially empty. For instance, we know that Fred will be surprised to hear that Charley is not a single ant. Notional content is the tool we need to make such a prediction possible. Notional content performs a traditional job of belief content.

For these reasons, (1n) is a good candidate for vindicating our intuition that Fred ’ s cognitive life is not devoid of substance.

I want to turn fi nally to our third problem, which was to explain same-saying, in cases of confusion. Same-saying can also be explained in terms of notional content: Suppose Fred and his neighbor Ted both agree that Charley has slept well. They say:

(5) Charley ’ s had a lot of sleep today.

What is it that they agree about? Again, with no item answering to the name ‘ Charley ’ , we ’ re in danger of seeing their agreement melt away to the mere fact that they both say something empty. But we can appeal to notional content to give more life to their same-saying: namely, their utterances of (5) have the same notional content:

(5n) That N c has an origin, and he has had a lot of sleep.

Again, this proposition places a substantive demand upon the world. It is a demand that isn ’ t met — the proposition is false — but is the basis for explaining our intuition that there is something substantive about Fred and Ted ’ s agreement.

Before closing this discussion, I want to return very briefl y to:

(4) Charley is not a single ant.

We said that (4) is true because its truth conditions specify that ‘ Charley ’ is a name with a certain kind of history. But now we can say more, namely, about the notional content of (4). With (4) one is committed to the further notional content that there is no single origin of Fred ’ s network of Charley-beliefs :

(4n) That N c has a no origin.

This proposition is also true. And it is what someone who is trying to clarify Fred ’ s confusion expresses at the level of notional content. 15

15 In a case like this, it ’ s interesting to note that the notional content of one ’ s utterance may be a better candidate than the referential propositional content for being ‘ what is said, ’ — that is, what one is consciously committed to in saying what one says.

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Let me briefl y summarize some important points about notional content. First, a belief or utterance can have notional content even if it is referentially empty, and lacking in referential content. Referential content is often identifi ed with ‘ what is said ’ or ‘ the proposition expressed ’ by an utterance. For this reason, beliefs and utterances lacking referential content are said to be ‘ empty ’ , though, as should be clear by now, we would do better to say such beliefs are referentially empty , but notionally full . Second, notional content is truth conditional — it is determined by holding fi xed certain facts about how a belief originated, and asking what has to be true of the world, for the belief to be true. Finally, we have many commitments in believing, and often these are tacit commitments about the causes of our beliefs. Notional content serves to capture these commitments, and consequently plays a traditional role of content in explaining behavior.

5. An Optimistic Solution to the Problem of Confusion

Let me briefl y review where we ’ ve got to: We have managed to make it plausible that confused beliefs and utterances are referentially empty. Specifi cally, we ’ ve seen an account on which Fred ’ s statement, to the effect that Charley is a big ant, has no referential content, and we ’ ve saved the idea from its seemingly implausible consequences, by supplying notional contents for Fred ’ s statements (like (1), (3) and (5)), and also supplying in a principled way truth conditions for relevant confusion-dispelling statements (like (4) above).

What we discovered is that, when we take confused beliefs to be referentially empty, we actually have a lot more to say about them. Notional contents give us the means to capture the commitments of confused — and so referentially empty — beliefs. We can understand a lot about otherwise empty beliefs, if we turn our attention to their notional contents. Now I want to show how notional contents let us be more optimistic about our normal interpretive practice surviving in the face of confusion.

The issue, recall, is to say what it is in virtue of which a confused person like Fred counts as reasoning well, despite his confusion, and to do so without giving up on understanding Fred ’ s beliefs. Fred extends his commitments about the world by means of inferential moves that are recognizably rational. Or so we would like to say. How can we say this, even as we say Fred ’ s confused statements are referentially empty?

My fi rst step is to argue that notional content provides an important means of giving substance to the claim that Fred ’ s inferences are rational.

Let ’ s consider an argument. To simplify matters, let ’ s consider one of Fred ’ s deductive inferences:

(6) Charley ate breakfast. (7) Charley ate lunch. (8) Charley ate dinner.

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On the basis of which Fred judges that:

(9) Charley has had three square meals today.

We want to say that Fred reasons well here, regardless of the emptiness of his confused statements. How can we say this? Note that each of Fred ’ s claims in the argument above has a related notional content:

(6n) That N c has an origin, and he ate breakfast. (7n) That N c has an origin, and he ate lunch. (8n) That N c has an origin, and he ate dinner.

So:

(9n) That N c has an origin, and he has eaten three square meals today.

If we assess Fred ’ s inference in light of the notional content of his relevant beliefs, his reasoning is truth-preserving. That is, although (6n)-(9n) are false, the transition from (6n)-(8n) to (9n) is nonetheless truth-preserving.

So, the short answer to the question of how to assess Fred ’ s reasoning, if we say his beliefs are referentially empty, is that they ’ re not so empty after all. Many beliefs that lack referential content bear some notional contents. And who says we have to stick only to referential content in assessing a person ’ s ability to make truth-preserving inferences? If we look at the notional contents of his beliefs, his inference is truth-preserving.

Someone might wonder whether notional contents are up to this sort of task — what makes them truth conditional, after all? And if notional contents aren ’ t truth conditional, then in what sense does the reasoning preserve truth? In reply, recall, that notional content is truth conditional: we hold fi xed all such facts about the person ’ s notion-network, except to let facts about the network ’ s origin (or lack thereof) go unspecifi ed, then we ask, given the facts about the network, what else has to be true for Fred ’ s statements to be true. (Given the facts about N c , when Fred says ’ Charley is a big ant ’ , one way the world has to be for his utterance to be true is that the little network of beliefs, N c , traces back to a single item, and that single item is a big ant.) The important point here is that the notional content of his statement, namely,

(1n) That N c has an origin, and he is a big ant,

is truth conditional content. And so, when we understand the rationality of Fred ’ s inferences in terms of notional contents, we are looking at reasoning that preserves truth.

I suggest, then, that notional contents provide the key to an optimistic solution to the problem of confusion. The very content that lets us understand the confused belief also lets us evaluate the confused person ’ s reasoning as rational .

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Someone (a defender of supervaluation, say) might complain that understanding the confused belief in terms of its notional content marks its own kind of departure from normal interpretive practice. After all, we noted above that our normal interpretive practice involves understanding a belief by grasping its truth conditions, and truth conditions are supposed to be determined by what the belief denotes and attributes; but of course, notional content is not determined by what the belief denotes and attributes. In response I suggest that with notional content what we have is not a departure from normal interpretive practice, but a clearer picture of what our normal practice has been, all along. When we face confusion, we naturally fall back on making sense of confused belief in terms of what the confused person takes himself to be thinking of. The semantic innovation I have described is really just a way of codifying this feature of our normal practice, when interpreting confused belief. We make sense of confused belief in terms of what the confused person takes himself to be thinking of — that is, in terms of its notional origin and the network of beliefs associated with that origin. (Our practice with confused belief moreover, is revealed to still involve understanding the belief by grasping its truth conditions. It is just that these truth conditions are determined by the belief ’ s notional features. So another way of saying what is wrong with the complaint is that not all truth conditions are determined by what the belief denotes and attributes).

But this is not the end of the answer to the problem of confusion. As we noted above, Joseph Camp thinks that any attempt to evaluate Fred ’ s statements for truth will end in disaster, when it comes to making Fred out to be a good reasoner. Camp claims we won ’ t be able so to evaluate Fred ’ s beliefs, while also in a principled way distinguishing Fred from a shoddy reasoner. That is, we still face the problem of special pleading.

6. Inferential Charity Without Special Pleading

The problem of special pleading needs sharpening. Roughly, we said, the problem is to distinguish, in a principled way, what makes the confused reasoner ’ s inference good, even though it produces the same erroneous judgment a shoddy reasoner produces. But this was only a rough statement of the problem.

One way we can try to sharpen the problem is in terms of the slipperiness of being a presupposition of an inference. Every inference is made against a background of what we might call ‘ inferential presuppositions ’ . When we say of an inference that it preserves truth, we say this with the (usually tacit) requirement that the inference ’ s presuppositions are met. (No one expects good inference to be truth-preserving come what may.) Claims such as, that singular terms are univocal , or, that no changes of context have occurred that would affect context-sensitive terms , and so forth, are all inferential presuppositions. Now, we have some latitude in ascribing inferential presuppositions. The problem is that it seems that if we ’ re clever enough and determined enough we might identify a crazy-quilt of requirements, calling them inferential presuppositions, such that even a shoddy reasoner ’ s inference

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would be truth-preserving if its presuppositions are met . For instance, of the person, Edward, who employs a deviant conditionalization rule, and thereby arrives at the same erroneous judgment that Fred does, we might say he doesn ’ t reason badly, but it is a presupposition of his reasoning that he lives in a world where such a rule delivers the right objective conditional probabilities. What is to stop us? If we are only ready to identify failures of inferential presupposition in Fred ’ s case, and not in Edward ’ s, maybe that ’ s just because we have a special fondness for Fred? This is one way of articulating the special pleading worry. 16

So here is the question: when we evaluate Fred ’ s reasoning, using notional contents, what are the inferential presuppositions of his reasoning — are they of a suspect or unusual kind? If they are, then we might be charged with special pleading on his behalf. If they aren ’ t, then we will have managed to understand Fred, and evaluate his inferences, without risking the charge of special pleading.

What presuppositions is Fred making when he makes his inference above, about Charley ’ s being hungry? When we evaluate that reasoning in terms of (6n)-(9n), what inferential presuppositions are we attributing to him? Recall:

(6n) That N c has an origin, and he ate breakfast. (7n) That N c has an origin, and he ate lunch. (8n) That N c has an origin, and he ate dinner.

So:

(9n) That N c has an origin, and he has eaten three square meals today.

One relevant inferential presupposition we make in judging Fred ’ s reasoning to preserve truth is that the item named ‘ Nc ’ is constant throughout. More specifi cally, Fred is presupposing the existence of a single item, the origin of all his ‘ Charley ’ beliefs. And he is presupposing that this single item is the self-same subject across his inference about ‘ Charley ’ .

So the question is, are these presuppositions of a suspect or unusual kind? The answer is, No. They are just the sort of presupposition we make in evaluating a non-confused person ’ s inferences. That is, we routinely make existence and univocity assumptions, when we evaluate reasoning. 17

16 There may be other ways of articulating the special pleading worry, but this is the best I ’ ve been able to come up with on Camp ’ s behalf.

17 It should be noted that these presuppositions of Fred ’ s fail, of course. This might tempt us to try a simpler argument that Fred is rational, when he makes his inferences about ‘ Charley ’ — namely, his reasoning is not bad, we might say, it ’ s just that key inferential presuppositions don ’ t hold. There is something to this line of thought, I believe. However, I don ’ t think we can dispense with notional content, in favor of inferential presuppositions, in interpreting Fred. The idea of inferential presuppositions does not provide a competing explanation of how to understand Fred and see him as rational. After all, it seems we need notional content to identify those inferential presuppositions of Fred ’ s in light of the failure of which Fred ’ s reasoning is excused.

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In sum, I think we can safely use the idea of notional content to resolve our interpretive puzzles about confusion without worrying that we thereby are going in for special pleading. It ’ s not just favoritism that has us fi nding Fred ’ s confused inferences respectable. We can manage to understand Fred, and evaluate his inferences according to normal interpretive practice.

7. Notional Worlds and Fictions

The central task of the paper is now complete — we have seen how we can use new semantic tools invented for dealing with empty names to make sense of confused beliefs and inferences. Before closing I want to make an extension of the notional content approach, to suggest how we might further develop its expressive power. And in doing so, I want to take a moment to distinguish the resulting view from another view that might seem similar. Specifi cally, I want to distinguish the notional content approach from fi ctionalism.

First, extending the view: I have argued that with notional content, we have in our hands the means to do justice to our intuitions about certain of the confused person ’ s statements. As I noted above, when asked to say what we think about Fred ’ s statement:


we feel uneasy saying it ’ s true or false. I noted we can make straightforward sense of this intuition when we treat ‘ Charley ’ as empty. Now, I want to add that sometimes we ’ d also really like to say that statements like (1) are almost true . Here is a brief suggestion about how we might extend the story about notional contents to cash out the idea of a claim like (1) ’ s being almost true . 18

Let ’ s begin by introducing the idea of a notional world . A notional world is given by the set of propositions expressing Fred ’ s notional contents as supplied by a given notion-network. Thus, a notional world is (most likely) not a complete description of the state of the entire world — it is only a small part of an entire world, and it refl ects the subject ’ s (most likely tacit) commitments about what causes his beliefs and perceptions.

Now we can speak as though a notional world were a possible world, or a portion of such a world. Call the notional world relevant to our Fred example ‘ W n ’ . In W n , we might then say, the network N c does have an origin, in a single ant, and Fred ’ s observations have all been informative about this ant. This is just a manner of speaking, just a vivid way of saying that in the actual world, the existence of this unique origin is a (tacit) commitment of Fred ’ s in making his ‘ Charley ’

18 Field (1973) notes that in the indeterminacy case, this is often what we want to say. Note that, clearly, we don ’ t want to say of every referentially empty belief that it is almost true — beliefs about Santa Claus are not. But many confused beliefs, we feel, are closer to true than false.

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statements. In a similar vein, we might also say, in the world, W n , a belief like (6) is true, since in W n there is a single big ant answering to the name ‘ Charley ’ , the subject of Fred ’ s observations, and he has had breakfast. I want to stress that this is just a vivid way of speaking. To say that, in the notional world, W n , Fred ’ s belief (6) is true is to say that (6) would be true in the actual world if Fred ’ s (tacit) commitments were realized in the actual world. Were Fred ’ s belief (6) to have had the cause he takes it to have (i.e. were it to have been caused by a unique big ant answering to ‘ Charley ’ ) his belief (6) would have been true.

Now further suppose, to persist in talking as if notional worlds were possible worlds, that W n weren ’ t so very far from the actual world. That is, suppose we can easily imagine some not very great changes in the course of the actual world that would land us in W n . In such a case, we might say, Fred ’ s belief is ‘ very nearly true.’

This is admittedly a very brief sketch of how we might use a notional worlds approach to capture more of what we want to say about confused belief, and much more needs to be said to fl esh it out. In the space remaining, I want only to stress that we must distinguish the resulting view about notional worlds from any kind of fi ctionalism. Very broadly, the kind of fi ctionalism I have in mind involves specifying fi ctional denotations for the confused belief to be about. Beliefs and utterances, on such a view, are said to be true if true-in-the-fi ction. 19

As should be clear, with notional content and notional worlds we are not in the business of supplying a truth-making denotation for the confused person ’ s thoughts. We don ’ t claim to have identifi ed a referent, notional-Charley , for Fred ’ s thoughts to be about, so as to make sense of Fred or to call his beliefs true. (After all, Charley doesn ’ t exist.) Notional content gives us a handle on Fred ’ s commitments in believing as he does and inferring as he does. With the extension about notional worlds, it may also give us a handle on how from true Fred ’ s beliefs are. In distinguishing the resulting view from fi ctionalism, it is important simply to note that we don ’ t use the idea of notional content in order to try to make Fred ’ s beliefs out to be fi ctionally true ; rather, we say Fred ’ s beliefs are actually empty , but perhaps close to true . I think this is closer to what we wanted to say all along. In any case, the distance between the notional worlds approach and a fi ctionalist approach is, I hope, clear.

8. Conclusion

Confusion is an important kind of failure — people are confused all the time, mistaking one thing for another, or taking two things to be the same. I have argued that our semantic treatment of confusion can be a lot like our semantic treatment of empty names. As a result, we can say that, although confused beliefs are referentially empty, they are notionally very rich. The reason this is true is that,

19 Camp ’ s (1988) proposal on which we interpret otherwise hard-to-interpret statements as being about characters in texts is a kind of fi ctionalism, on this broad understanding of what fi ctionalism involves.

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even if confusion involves a failure, confused people still have many cogent commitments about the causes of their beliefs. For this reason, too, we can be optimists about maintaining our normal interpretive practices in the face of confused belief.

Department of Philosophy Stanford University

References

Camp , J. 2002 : Confusion: A Study in the Theory of Knowledge . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Camp , J. 1988 : Why attributions of aboutness report soft facts . Philosophical Topics , XVI , 5 – 30 .

Evans , G. 1982 : Varieties of Reference . Oxford : Clarendon Press . Field , H. 1973 : Theory change and the indeterminacy of reference . Journal of Philosophy ,

70 , 462 – 81 . Frost-Arnold , G. 2005 : Too much reference . American Philosophical Association (Eastern

Division) presentation . Lawlor , K. 2005 : Confused thought and modes of presentation . Philosophical Quarterly ,

55 , 218 , 21 – 37 . Millikan , R . G . 2000 : On Clear and Confused Ideas . Cambridge : Cambridge University

Press . Perry , J. 2001 : Reference and Refl exivity . Stanford : CSLI Publications. Powell , G. 2002 : Underdetermination and the principles of semantic theory . Proceedings

of the Aristotelian Society , 102 , 3 , 321 – 328 .

A Notional Worlds Approach to Confusion

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