Fregean contents again

Frege has been much in the air this week. Let's make sure we really understand what it's all about. What we have to puzzle out is (i) what it would mean for perceptual states to have "Fregean" (as opposed to/in addition to "Russellian") contents,
(ii) what kind of challenge indexicality, as we find it in natural language, poses for Frege (we do this in the absence of acquaintance with Frege's own work on the subject), (iii) what Frege can tell us about the distinction, recently discussed in Crimmins's "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference" between a sentence's truth-conditions and its modal contents.

I. Fregean and Russellian contents

Fregeans make a sense-reference distinction. Each meaningful term has two sorts of semantic values, a sense and a reference. The referent of a sentence is a truth-value. Senses determine reference; senses of whole sentences, therefore, are truth-conditions. One and the same referent, for a single term or for a whole sentence, may have different senses. Frege had two goals in doing this. One was to explain why identity statements could be contingently true. Another was to explain why they could be cognitively significant; different modes of presentation can plan distinct inferential roles in our mental lives.

At a first pass, to hold that a perceptual state exhibits Fregean contents is to hold that it it contains objects under modes of presentation. We could want these modes of presentation to explain (a) why it is that we do not always recognize the sameness of objects we encounter on different occasions (thus leaving space for cognitively significant breakthroughs when we do come to make informative identity statements on the basis of our perceptions). (b) a point more intimately related to phenomenology of perception, which we would have even if we were omniscient, and always knew when we were looking at the same thing twice. This is simply that when we see things, we see them in a certain phenomenal way. Perhaps that things we see are presented to us in a certain way is just completely obvious. The way in which things are presented to us is, for example, what naturalistic painters are good at capturing.

Siegel writes that

"one of the two roles of m.o.p.'s is to determine reference...another is to reflect cognitive significance."

What about the determination of reference? The intuition is that when we are perceptually in contact with particular objects, we can perceive them incorrectly yet still have contents involving them. So it seems that mode of presentation does not determine reference; reference is determined by context and causal contact. Note that whether or not this makes perceptual content different from linguistic content depends on whether we take the objects represented in experience to be represented in a "name-like" (or demonstrative-like) way, or in a "complex description"-like way. So what to do?...do we abandon Fregean contents, or endorse Russellian contents as well, to capture get the objects we are in causal contact with into the contents of our experience? Moreover, if we go the double-content route (both Fregean and Russellian), do we do so for objects, for properties, or for both? A "double-double" content of a red cube (called 'o') would then contain: (1) o, (2) a mode of presentation of o, (3) o's redness, (4) a mode of presentation of o's redness.

A puzzle: suppose we incorrectly perceive object o as orange (due to funny lighting). It is certainly o which we are (mis)perceiving, but are we (i) misperceiving its redness (presumably, as orange-ness), or (ii) failing to perceive its redness at all? If we go for (ii) then the double-double-content looks overstuffed; we aren't really getting (3) at all. This seems like the right intuition for this case. The difference between this case and the regular inverted spectrum cases (which inspired Shoemaker, for example, to endorse doubled content for color properties) is that the subject is mistaken by her own criteria; if she were to perceive the cube in regular lighting, she would call it "red", not "orange." On the other hand, the lawlike ways in which funny lighting gives rise to misperceptions of color might convince someone that (3) really gets into the content of the perceptual state after all; if the cube weren't red, it wouldn't have been perceived *as orange* in the funny light.

The upshot seems to be this. Frege's original purpose in making the sense-reference distinction was to get a "meaning" (semantic value) for lexical constituents that was fine-grained enough to explain the informativeness of identity statements, while still making it the case that the fine-grained meaning determined course-grained meaning. Now we see arguments that fine-grained (cognitive) content cannot determine coarse-grained (extensional) content. We could just go for both; perhaps not much is lost (according to "two-dimensionalists" about perceptual content) if all that needs to be added to Frege's story is that fine-grained cognitive content *in combination with context* determines extensional content. This is the kind of "narrow content" view (once) endorsed by Fodor. In formal semantics, when it is the context (rather than index) that determines the extension of [phi], then [phi] is an indexical. [phi] is a word, and a constituent of a larger sentence.

Now, I do NOT know what it would mean to say that a constituent of the content of a perceptual experience is an indexical, where 'constituent' is used in the same way.

We will continue this discussion in II below.

II. Frege and Indexicality.

We break from perceptual experience altogether to consider Frege and Indexicality. Consider what a proto-Fregean, equipped only with the sense-reference distinction and the two goals it intends to achieve (cognitive significance and the determination of reference), would have to say about the indexical "I". First, he would face a puzzle about just what the reference of "I" is, since it can be used by different people to refer to different people.

Rather than a sameness of identity underlying [Venus] a proliferation of senses [morning star, evening star] this case gives us a proliferation of different identities underlying a sameness of sense!

The appropriate thing to do, it seems, is abandon the idea that sense determines reference, and argue instead that the sense of "I" only determines reference on an occasion of use. We will have to individuate "occasions of use" finely, however, to capture the fact that only I can secure reference to me using the "I"-mode of presentation. The crucial feature of an "occasion of use," here, is who the user is; you and I cannot occupy the same "occasion of use".

The cognitive significance point is preserved, since it explains why it is informative to learn (on some occasions) that I am the tallest person in the room, while at other times, it is not informative (or indeed even true.) What about a rigid designator statement like "I am Melissa"? We can account for what is cognitively significant about this by characterizing ignorance as ignorance of features of context (aka "occasions of use.")

The new knowledge can be glossed metalinguistically:

I am the the referent of "Melissa".

...in which case we can characterize it as an ignorance of features of the world after all. But I suspect that this gloss is a violation of what---now that I can take the phrase from another authority!---I would call "semantic phenomenology." It seems that when I learn that e.g. *I'm* the one making the mess, what I learn is a fact about the world, not a fact about my language. But a deeper understanding of what is at stake in making this point would be facilitated by a better understanding of the two kinds of disquotational and referential principles we use (as discussed for example by McG/McL).*

III. Crimmins's distinction between truth-conditions and modal contents

The simple move here appears to be equating truth-conditions with communicative content (what Dummett calls "Assertoric content") and modal contents with, well, modal contents (what Dummett calls "Ingredient sense"). We can think of what Crimmins says about compositionality in this light. It is ingredient sense--modal content--which is directly constrained by compositionality, because it is in this mode that we consider what a well-formed sentence needs to contribute to larger sentences of which it is a constituent.

We do not assert the sub-sentences of our asserted sentences (except perhaps in the very special case of sentences conjoined by "and") so there is no need to assign assertoric contents directly to sub-sentences. Thus we have some wiggle room to characterize the communicative (= assertoric) content differently than we characterize the modal content of the same sentence...and perhaps we need to do so by explaining mechanisms of pretense, irony, metaphor, etc.

The distinction is particularly important for a pretense account because it is truth-conditions and not modal contents which are globally affected by pretense. It is no part of the pretense account that there are e.g. pretense-referencing or pretense-triggering lexemes within identity statements (or nonexistence statements, etc.) themselves. Rather, there are classifications of whole chunks of discourse, well above the sentential level.

The account can be usefully compared with discourse representation theory in this way...*Except that*, in discourse representation theory, some lexemes *do* operate directly on a representation which is built up above the sentential level!

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Siegel, S. "The contents of perception", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Crimmins, M. "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference." In Martinich, ed., The Philosophy of Language (5th edition), Oxford.