Nonindexical Contextualism and content

Today, we look askance at the word "content". What is this term, from philosophy of mind, doing in our semantic theorizing? We are not sure; our suspicions are roused.

Yet Prof. MacFarlane talks at length about content in "Nonindexical contextualism," where he argues for the existence and viability of a view on which epistemic operators are context-sensitive without being indexical. Translation into our suspect terminology: an epistemic standard parameter may play a circumstance-determinative role without playing a content-determinative role in our semantics.

From his discussion, the following, at least, are clear about content:

*the content of a sentence-at-a-context is intuitively identified with a proposition
*sentences with indexicals express different propositions (hence, have different contents) at different contexts.
*the content of a sentence determines its truth-value at a context of use.

...From this, it seems that the right thing to conclude is that content of a sentence-at-a-context is just its semantic intension. All the indexicals are, so to speak, "filled in", but the the resulting intension has not yet been evaluated at the circumstance of the context, so the intension has not yet been reduced to an extension (either T or F.)

Another way to get a bead on content, suggested by MacFarlane's discussion, is to look at the dispute between Temporalism and Eternalism. For Eternalists, the time of the context gets into the content of tensed sentences like "Socrates is sitting":

"On the Eternalist's view, the sentence ["Socrates is sitting"] varies in truth-value across times because it expresses different propositions at different times." (4)


This suggests the following gloss on the difference between Eternalism and Temporalism in terms of semantic values:

(Temp) [[Socrates is sitting]]^c_{\varnothing}* = \lambda w. \lambda t. Socrates is sitting in w at t
(Eter) [[Socrates is sitting]]^c_{\varnothing} = \lambda w . \lambda t . Socrates is sitting in w at t_c.

...hence on this view what it means for the Eternalists and Temporalists to disagree about what proposition "Socrates is sitting" expresses is for them to disagree on the intension of the sentence. Behold the "t_c" in the Eternalist's semantic entry; this is an indexical, just as "speaker_c" would be the meaning of "I" or "loc_c" would be the meaning of "here." So, on this entry, the Eternalist just thinks that "Socrates is sitting" is synonymous with "Socrates is sitting now."

What I find confusing about this is that I am unable to give a proper semantic entry for temporal operators on the eternalist's view. "Socrates is sitting" does NOT behave like "Socrates is sitting now" in that, of course, [[It will always be the case that Socrates is sitting]] is not the same as [[It will always be the case that Socrates is sitting now.]] Any eternalist view must account for this difference; the Eternalist cannot be so easily refuted as that!

...He must account for it in the same way that a possible worlds theorist accounts for the intuitive truth conditions of "Snow is white" as opposed to "Snow is actually white." He must hold that unembedded assertions like "Snow is white" are as a default evaluated at the world of the context, but that they are still shift-able in the scope of modal operators. I can see two ways to do this. One is to mimic, for our intuitive notion of content, the semanticists intensional type-lift: hold that content is usually extension, unless it is *forced* to be intension by the presence of a model operator. Hence: an unembedded "snow is white" utterance is true if snow is white in w_c, yet the contribution "snow is white" makes in the scope of modal operators does not refer us back to w_c.

The problem with this is that it makes nonsense of the other things MacFarlane says about content. For example, he says of the sentence "tomorrow comes after today" that it expresses different contents at different contexts, while having the same truth-value at every context. However, if the content of an unembedded expression is its EX-tension, then it cannot vary in this way.

The only other way I can see is to hold that content is what Prof. Yalcin calls "centered diagonal content", where this is lambda-abstraction over the c parameter. Hence:

(Temp) [[Socrates is sitting]]^wt_{\varnothing}** = \lambda c. Socrates is sitting at w_c
(Eter) [[Socrates is sitting]]^wt_{\varnothing} = \lambda c . Socrates is sitting at w_c and t_c.

Note once again the absence of t_c from (Temp). What, now, would the difference between (Temp) and (Eter) come to? Almost nothing, which is, perhaps, the point...It seems only to support the following intuition:

"If I had said "Socrates is sitting" at another time, it would have expressed a different content."

...this is true for (Eter) and not for (Temp). These creatures, (Eter) and (Temp), are NOT the arguments of temporal operators. What *are* the intensions on this view? It must be...

(Temp) [[Socrates is sitting]]^c_{\varnothing} = \lambda w . Socrates is sitting in w
(Eter) [[Socrates is sitting]] ^c_{\varnothing} = \lambda w . \lambda t . Socrates is sitting in w at t

Now this is pretty odd. On this version of temporalism, sentence truth looks like this:

A sentence s is true at a context c iff [[S]] is true at w_c and t_c. [hence there need be no temporal content "in" S.]
(A sentence s is true at a context c iff the proposition expressed by S is true when evaluated at the circumstance of C. = (25), pg. 21.)

And temporal operators look...metalinguistic, I guess, like this:

[[ALWAYS \phi]]^cwt = \lambda w . \forall c' s.t. w_c' = w_c, [[\phi]] expresses a truth at the circumstance determined by c; [[\phi]]^w_c, t_c is true.

...this view looks very strange to me, though we should note of an analogous move for epistemic standard parameters it is widely conceded that there *are* no shifters. The arguments in favor of such a view must mostly be content-based ones in the phil-mind sense, because semantically speaking, it's ugly.*** (Perhaps the right thing to say about this ugliness is that we are simply no longer speaking about any kind of semantic value or anything straightforwardly derivable from a semantic value.)

Here is such a consideration: the propositions we believe (= the contents of sentence at a context) intuitively don't determine truth "all by themselves." Sam believes it is 0 degrees--is that belief true or false? Well, we don't know until we know the time and place his belief 'concerns'. We also need to know what world he's in, and intuitively his belief isn't about worlds:

"One might respond to these considerations by bringing the world of the context of use into the *content* of Sam's thought. But intuitively, Sam could have had a thought with the same content even if the world had been very different." (16)

According to Temporalism, both worlds and times play a circumstance- but not content-determining role. For Eternalism, times play a content-as-well-as-circumstance determining role. Yet I am puzzled about how to make this work in the formal semantics, because I am puzzled by how content is supposed to interact with intensions. We have a good argument that intensions must have an *open* (hence shiftable) time-parameter, but whether this legislates that time does not play a content-determining role depends on what the relationship between intensions and contents is. In the epistemic standards case, once it is conceded that there are no shifters, we don't need an open (hence shiftable) time-parameter in the intension. Perhaps we don't need one *at all*, and it is this that nonindexical contextualism amounts to. The difference then would not be between a *free* t-parameter and a [contextually] *bound* t-parameter, but rather a difference between a [contextually] *bound* e-parameter and...no e-parameter at all.

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*e.g., the intension of the sentence, rather than the extension. (Following Heim and von Fintel.) Note the index here comprises world-time ordered pairs.

**Generalizing the pattern to mean abstraction over c but not w and t? Probably this is abuse of notation.

***Note that this won't work for the world parameter anyway, for familiar reasons: it is not sufficient for the truth of the sentence "necessarily p" that p express a truth at every context.

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MacFarlane, J. "Nonindexical Contextualism." Synthese 166, 2009.

Yalcin, S. "Notes on semantics, context, and content". Handout at UC Berkeley for Phil 290-5, 9/16/2010.