Читать книгу Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures - D. E. Buckner - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI have little to say about prayer or worship. The question of this book is about reference. If the name “Allah” in the Quran refers to what “The Lord” refers to in the New Testament or to what “YHWH” refers to in the Hebrew Bible, then clearly Jews, Christians, and Muslims are referring to the same god, whatever language they speak. If praying to is a form of address using a name, and if the name refers to the same being, then Jews, Christians, and Muslims are praying to the same god.1 But many deny this, particularly when it comes to the possible identity of God and Allah.
Nor am I primarily concerned with the question of the existence of the individuals mentioned in the Bible, including that of the divine being himself. There is independent contemporary evidence for the existence of some of the individuals mentioned in the New Testament, including Herod Archelaus and Herod the Great (whose names are on coins), Pontius Pilate (referenced as “prefect of Judea” on a limestone inscription discovered in 1961), and Quirinius (mentioned on a tomb inscription), but this book is not primarily about the historical truth of the Bible, nor the existence of any or all of the biblical characters. It is about how we are able to refer to or identify them. If reference is a relation of some kind between language and reality, what is the nature of that relation? How can there be such a relation if some of the characters do not even exist? How is reference successful, given our limited information about the individuals referred to? In particular, how can we succeed in referring to the same person or being, even when we do not know that we are doing so? How can the writers of the New Testament refer to people in the Hebrew Bible, such as Isaiah and Moses? How can the Quran refer to the same people? What being are they talking about when they use the proper names “God,” “יְהֹוָה” or “ﷲ”?
The central puzzle is what makes the following reference statement true (or false).
The second word of the Quran refers to God.
If we can answer this, we can answer the question of whether Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. The reference statement contains a mentioning term (“second word of the Quran”), the verb phrase “refers to,” and the referring term “God,” as well as implying the existence of a mentioned term that is not in the statement itself, namely the second word of the Quran, the word we translate as “Allah” or “God,” transliterated as “al-lāhi.”2 Clearly the statement is true when the mentioned term (the second word of the Quran) co-refers with the referring term (“God”). If the second word of the Quran refers to some divine being X, and if “God” in the aforementioned statement also refers to X, the identity statement “God is Allah” is true.3
The thesis of this book is that such co-reference is not an extralinguistic relation between the two terms and an external, extralinguistic object (God), but rather an intralinguistic semantic relation between the terms themselves. Thus, it is true even for atheists that “God” refers to God, and that Jews, Christians, and atheists worship the same God. I call this the intralinguistic thesis. It follows that a reference statement is illusory: its linguistic form purports to express a relation between a mentioned term and an object, but instead is verified by a relation between the mentioned term and the referring term. In this chapter, I shall (i) outline the standard theory of reference which is the main target of this book; (ii) outline some of the problems with the standard theory; (iii) introduce the key points of my non-standard intralinguistic theory of reference; and (iv) set out how the book is organized.
The Standard Theory of Reference
“Reference” has many senses, and a common understanding of the word derives from an early mistranslation of the Frege’s term Bedeutung.4 A common and pre-theoretical definition is that a term refers when it signifies which thing we are talking about in making a statement.5 “Reference” I shall characterize as what happens when we refer, and I shall use the terms “identification” and “designation” as synonymous for the most part with “reference.” Reference is what singular or definite terms do, and what common or indefinite terms don’t. The name “Socrates” in “Socrates is running” tells us which person is said to be running, or (in philosophical jargon) tells us which individual satisfies the predicate “is running.” Singular terms contrast with common terms, which do not specify who satisfies the predicate. “Some philosopher is running” is true if at least one of Socrates, or Plato, Aristotle, and so on is running, no matter which one. Thus, “some philosopher” does not refer. Or suppose it did, for example, to Socrates. Then, “it is not the case that some philosopher is running” would be true when Socrates is not running, even if it is the case that some other philosopher, say Plato, is running, which is absurd.
The standard theory of reference, sometimes called “direct reference,” is primarily a theory about proper names. It involves two assumptions. The first is the nondescription assumption, that a proper name has no connotation or descriptive sense that determines its reference. As Abelard argued, the accidental properties connected with some description can hardly enter into the imposition of the signification of the name, or the name would change its meaning through time. “Socrates was called Socrates before he became a musician, and will be so called after he ceases to be the son of Sophroniscus [i.e., after Sophroniscus dies].”6 More recently, Kripke has said much about this. The second assumption is what Devitt calls the semantic presupposition 7 that there are no other possible candidates for a name’s meaning other than a descriptive meaning, or the bearer of the name itself. If both assumptions are correct, the meaning of a proper name is none other than the bearer itself, that is, the name is merely a tag or label for its bearer, and has no other significance.
These two assumptions (nondescription and semantic presupposition) are of crucial importance to the theoretical framework of classical (i.e., the twentieth century) semantics, entailing as they do that sentences with empty names cannot express propositions. In that framework, the truth conditions or proposition (or information content) expressed by a sentence, relative to a context, are compositionally determined by the semantic values or referents of the terms in the sentence.8 The structure and components of the proposition mirror the structure and components of the sentence expressing the proposition. To understand a sentence we have to grasp its truth conditions: the way the world has to be if the sentence is true, but the truth conditions are determined by the referents of the words in the sentence, including the referent of any proper name. Hence, we cannot understand what is expressed by the sentence unless the words, including any proper names, have a referent. As Evans, in his exposition of Frege, says:
The Proper Name “John” has the role of introducing an object, which is to be the argument to the function introduced by the concept-expression “ξ is wise”—a function which maps all and only wise objects to the value True. Thereby, and only thereby, is the sentence determined as having a truth-value, and, therefore, as having the significance of a complete sentence—something capable of being used alone to make an assertion.9
When a sentence contains an empty name, the name cannot introduce an object as argument to the function, the function has no value, that is, no truth value, and the sentence cannot express a thought or a proposition. Evans again, quoting Frege:
The sentence “Leo Sachse is a man” is the expression of a thought [Ausdruck eines Gedankens] only if “Leo Sachse” designates [bezeichnet] something.10
The standard theory also entails that the existence of a bearer is presupposed, rather than asserted, by a subject-predicate sentence containing a proper name. As Frege argues, the negation of “Kepler died in misery” is not “Kepler did not die in misery, or the name ‘Kepler’ has no significance,”11 that is, “Kepler died in misery” is not a conjunction of the statements that “Kepler” is significant and that Kepler died in misery.12 According to the standard theory, it is presupposed rather than asserted that that the name “Kepler” is significant, hence (because the name signifies the bearer) it must be presupposed that the bearer exists.
A further corollary of the standard theory is that there can be only one reason for a proper name sentence being false, namely that the predicate does not apply to the subject. Hence, on that theory, there can be only one form of negation for proper name subject-predicate sentences, namely wide scope or sentential negation. If “Moses was a prophet” is false, it is because Moses existed but was not a prophet. This corollary is reflected in the standard notation of the predicate calculus: the negation “Fa” is “~Fa.” On the standard theory, proper names are not descriptive, or properly speaking, are not predicable, a predicable being an expression that yields a proposition about something if we attach it to an expression, that is, a singular term, which stands for, that is, designates or refers to, what we are forming the proposition about.13 As Geach says:
To Frege we owe it that modern logicians almost universally accept an absolute category-difference between names and predicables; this comes out graphically in the choice of letters from different founts of type for the schematic letters of variables answering to these two categories.14
A predicable can be empty if nothing has the property it expresses, for example,” round square.” Frege explains that a common name like “planet” has no direct relation to the Earth. You can understand the concept it signifies without anything falling under the concept, for a predicable is not intrinsically about any object. “If I utter a sentence with the grammatical subject ‘all men,’ I do not wish to say something about some Central African chief wholly unknown to me.” But a proper name cannot be empty. “A proper name that designates nothing is illegitimate (unberechtigt).”15
Thus, on the standard theory, reference is a relation between a linguistic expression, such as a proper name, and an extralinguistic item, the object that an author (or speaker) uses the expression to write (or talk) about, and so is an extralinguistic or word-world relation.16 The co-reference between the names “God” in the first line of the Quran, and in “The second word of the Quran refers to God,” is explained by means of an external relation to a third item, namely God himself. We understand that the first token signifies God, that the second token signifies him also, and thereby understand that the two tokens co-refer. The co-reference takes place only because the tokens both “hit” the same object in external reality. According to the standard theory, “reference” is primary, co-reference is secondary.
The standard theory of reference, which begins with Frege,17 contrasts with the traditional “Aristotelian” semantics, which it supplanted at the end of the nineteenth century. In Aristotelian semantics, there is also a distinction between proper names and common terms. At the beginning of chapter 7 of the Perihermenias, Aristotle says that some “things,” that is, terms, are universal, others singular. He has in mind the distinction between a common term (“man”) and a proper name (“Callias”). A universal or common term is that which by nature can be predicated of (κατηγορεῖσθαι) different individuals, such as Socrates and Callias.18 A proper name is what can be predicated of only one individual. Following Aristotle, scholastic logicians like Peter of Spain claimed that a singular term is suited by nature (aptus natus) to be predicated of (i.e., to denote) one thing only.19 His contemporary William of Sherwood said that “Socrates” is predicable of one person only “with respect to the form signified by the name Socrates.”20
However, in Aristotelian semantics, unlike standard semantics, there is no fundamental distinction between names and predicables. Both proper and common names lie in the same sort of relation to an object, a relation which the medieval semanticists called suppositio. But a proper name is proper to just one object, so proper name propositions are universal as well as existential. “Socrates is a philosopher” states that at least one person is (identical with) Socrates, and that every such person is a philosopher. Hence, just as a common name like “planet” can be empty if there are no planets, so a proper name can be empty yet function perfectly well in a proposition. “Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit” states that at least one person is (identical with) Bilbo, and that every such person is a philosopher and so, while it states something perfectly coherent, is false. On the Aristotelian theory of the proposition,21 a subject-predicate sentence containing a proper name asserts rather than presupposes the existence of the proper name’s bearer, and asserts (or denies) that the predicate applies to it. Thus, there are two causes of the sentence being false: (i) the predicate does not apply to the bearer (or does apply, if the sentence is negative), (ii) there is no bearer at all. There are also two forms of negative: wide scope, where the negation applies across the whole sentence, and narrow scope where the negation applies to the predicate only. Thus, in Aristotelian semantics, sentences with empty names are false, rather than lacking a truth value.
In summary, a singular term signifies by telling us which individual satisfies the predicate of a proposition. In the proposition,22 “Moses is a prophet,” the proper name “Moses” tells us which object is said to be a prophet, or which individual satisfies the predicate “is a prophet.” Any theory of reference needs to explain how this is possible. According to the standard theory, this is achieved by means of a semantic relation between the term and the object, that is, a semantic relation between a linguistic item, a word such as “Moses,” and an extralinguistic item, namely Moses himself. The standard theory is the target of this book.
Problems with the Standard Theory
There are a number of well-known problems with the standard theory, and an extensive literature has been devoted to engaging with them. I summarize the main difficulties as follows.
(1) The theory leads to the absurdity that objects, including large planetary masses, are actually a part of our thought. We use language to signify our thoughts, with the aim that others can understand or grasp what we have said. What is signified is what is understood, as the medieval philosophers put it,23 and what is understood is the thought the speaker has expressed. But if a proper name signifies its bearer, the bearer must somehow be a part of the thought expressed. This is absurd. I can express the thought that Jupiter is a planet, but how can Jupiter, with its massive gravitational field and poisonous atmosphere, be literally a part of my thought?24
(2) The theory provides no coherent explanation of how we establish a connection between names and their bearers. Mill says (A System of Logic, I. ii. 5, see also I. v. 2.) that they are simply marks for objects, giving the example of a chalk mark upon a door, but, perhaps seeing how this fails to explain how a proper name can be a mark of something that is not in front of us, or which has long since ceased to exist, he says that this is by analogy only, and that the mark is upon our idea of the object. “A proper name is but an unmeaning mark which we connect in our minds with the idea of the object, in order that whenever the mark meets our eyes or occurs to our thoughts, we may think of that object” (my emphasis). He does not explain how a mark can be meaningless, yet be connected in our mind with the idea of an object, nor does he explain what the idea of an individual object is. He says elsewhere that our concept of Caesar is “the presentation in imagination of the individual Caesar as such,”25 but this does not help much.
(3) The theory has difficulty in explaining how we frequently use names that we know to be empty, for example in fiction, and how it is possible that many names that we believe to have a bearer may possibly not have a bearer, for example “Moses.” According to the theory, the meaning of a proper name is the bearer itself, so a sentence containing an empty name cannot have a meaning. But the Torah appears to be meaningful, whether or not Moses existed, as is a work of acknowledged fiction such as The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, it requires that a name must have a bearer, which seems absurd. “Moses is a prophet” says of someone (Moses) that he is a prophet, “Moses is not a prophet” says of the same person that he is not a prophet. One or the other must be true, so on the standard theory, both propositions require us to say something of Moses, which we can’t do unless he exists. How then do we deal with the possibility that Moses does not exist? Indeed, how do we deal with the possibility that God does not exist? When the atheist denies “God exists,” the name “God” must signify precisely what the fideist asserts by the same sentence. On the standard theory, this seems impossible.
(4) The standard theory suggests that different proper names for the same bearer could be substituted without changing the meaning of a sentence. Thus “Cicero is Tully” has the same meaning as “Cicero is Cicero,” given that “Cicero” and “Tully” have the same bearer. Yet no one would disbelieve “Cicero is Cicero,” for it expresses a logical truth, while someone might not believe “Cicero is Tully.” This suggests the two names have a different meaning, yet the standard theory says they have the same meaning.
Though these are not the only problems, they are recognized as the main ones.
The Intralinguistic Thesis
The intralinguistic thesis defended here consists of three connected claims. The first claim, the co-reference thesis, is that there is a phenomenon I call signified or guaranteed co-reference, where it is clear simply from the meaning of two statements that if one statement asserts (or denies) that some thing is such and such, then the other statement asserts (or denies) that the same thing is so and so. The paradigm is pronominal back-reference. It is part of our understanding of pronoun use that if “Herod realized that he had been outwitted, and he was furious” is true, then the first part of the sentence says that someone had been outwitted, and the second part says that the same person was furious. When I talk about “co-reference,” I shall always mean this form of anaphoric co-reference. Pronouns are a paradigm, but clearly different tokens of the same proper name can co-refer in the same way, for example, the first and second occurrences of “God” at the beginning of the book of Genesis.
In the beginning God (‘ĕ-lō-hîm, ὁ θεὸς, Deus) created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God (‘ĕ-lō-hîm, θεοῦ, Dei) was hovering over the waters.
I claim that there is nothing philosophically difficult about explaining co-reference. That is not to say that the explanation, which is a scientific and technical matter, is not complex and difficult, but rather that it is a task for computational linguistics, not philosophy. It is non-philosophically difficult to explain the exact rules by which we determine co-reference in all cases, which I will discuss in the next chapter, but it seems clear that in the natural and obvious reading of the passage given earlier, the two tokens of “God” have a common referent, if they have a referent at all, and so there is no philosophical difficulty. The philosophical difficulties are whether co-reference implies reference (I argue that it does), whether reference implies reference to something (I argue that it does), and whether, if so, reference to something implies that there is (or there exists) something such that it is referred to (I argue that it does not, but this raises some difficult questions that I defer until chapter 7).
The second claim, the reference thesis,26 is that the semantic value of a proper name consists solely in its anaphoric co-reference with its antecedents in a chain of co-referring terms, and that the truth of a reference statement depends upon such co-reference, even if no referent exists.
As stated earlier, a reference statement contains a mentioning term, such as “second word of the Quran,” a mentioned term, a token available in some antecedent text or utterance, and a used term. For example:
• In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
• The fourth word of the previous sentence refers to him.
The mentioning term is “The fourth word of the previous sentence,” the mentioned term is “God,” and the used term is “him.” On the standard theory, the truth of a reference statement depends (i) on an external relation between the mentioned term and an external referent, in this case, God, and (ii) on the same relation obtaining between the referent and the term in the reference statement itself. Thus, on the standard theory, the relation must obtain twice: between the proper name “God” and the pronoun “him.” The reference statement must have an external truthmaker, in this case God.
On the reference thesis, by contrast, no extralinguistic truthmaker is required. The conditions for the reference statement to be true are, first, that the mentioned term (“God”) anaphorically co-refers with the used term (“him”). This is clearly so in the above example, hence the reference statement must be true whether or not “God” has an external referent at all, so cannot express a relation between “God” and an external referent. The second condition is that the mentioned term must have some antecedent in a chain of co-referring terms. If a story begins “There was a young man called ‘Mark,’” then we can say truly that “Mark” refers to the young man, for the mentioned term “Mark” has the antecedent “a young man,” which co-refers with “the young man” in our reference statement. But we cannot say that “a young man” refers to Mark, for “a young man” cannot be an anaphor term, given that the whole purpose of an indefinite term is to block any kind of back-reference. An indefinite term a cannot locate any previous term b such that it is clear simply from the meaning of the statements containing them that if one is true of a thing, the other, if true, is true of the same thing also. Some writers (such as Sommers) have claimed that indefinite terms, such as “a young man,” have a sort of non-identifying reference. This is a mistake, which I shall discuss in chapter 3.
Thus, according to the reference thesis, a reference statement is illusory: it purports to express a relation between a mentioned term and an object, but such a relation is not what makes it true. What makes it true is a relation that is intralinguistic, although its grammatical form misleadingly suggests the relation is extralinguistic. On this hypothesis, co-reference is primary, reference is secondary. The thesis has wide ranging implications (e.g., for received logico-philosophical principles such as the necessity of identity).
I will not argue for the thesis at length now, except to say, and to avoid any confusion, that I am not claiming that one term refers to another. I am not, for instance, saying that “God” refers to the word “God,” or that the name “Moses” refers to the expression “the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt.” On the contrary, “Moses” refers to a man, not an expression. That is to say, it is true that “Moses” refers to a man. However I claim that what makes it true is not some external reference relation between “Moses” and that man, but rather an internal relation between the reference statement and some textual or uttered antecedent. Nor does the name refer to the concept of Moses, for the noun phrase “the concept of Moses” does that.27 Nor do I claim that there are intentional objects or non-existent things. I shall argue (see chapter 7) that the name “Asmodeus” refers to Asmodeus, so the name “Asmodeus” refers to something. I shall argue that we can truly think of Asmodeus hence, in thinking of Asmodeus, be thinking of something. But the grammatical objects of intentional verbs like “refer to,” “think of” do not require that there be anything that satisfies them. The fact that “Asmodeus” refers to something does not entail that there is (or exists) something which is the referent of “Asmodeus,” nor that “Asmodeus” has a referent, for the non-intentional verb, phrase “has a referent” does not function in the same way as the intentional verb phrase “refers to.” I say this to avoid all confusion about my use of that verb phrase in the text that follows.
The third claim, the dependency thesis, is that communicating with proper names is dependent on the availability of a common text such as the Hebrew Bible, which uses those names (“Moses”) within a narrative, rather than a dictionary, which contains mostly general names (“prophet”) and which merely makes the names without using them.
Any theory of proper names must explain why names for our relatives, friends and neighbors are generally not in dictionaries, and why learning how to use them is not in any sense a prerequisite for learning the language, whereas common names like “red,” “round,” “person,” “house,” and so on are found in all dictionaries, and are in some sense necessary for understanding the language. Somewhere in between, there are proper names, such as “Caesar” and “Moses,” which are found in some dictionaries, but are not in any sense necessary for understanding English, as opposed to understanding history or theology.
Any theory must also explain why there is a proper name/common name distinction, and a local/national distinction between proper names. Locke explains the first on the assumption that in order to understand a proper name, we must be acquainted with its bearer, so that we have “the idea in my mind” of it, and in order to communicate using the name, the other person must also be acquainted with the bearer.28 Common terms, by contrast, signify “general ideas,” which are separated from the circumstances of time and place, “and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence.” Since we use language to communicate our thought by combining general ideas, language for the most part consists of general terms.
Reid explains the local/national division by a similar reasoning. He says the meaning of a local name is “known” only to the people in the locality, assuming like Locke that we can only know it through acquaintance with the bearer. Such knowledge will be unavailable to the greater part of the community that uses the language. There are a few proper names that are understood by the whole community (he mentions “the Sun” as an example, but presumably “Caesar” and “Moses” would do), but that is because the bearers are known to the whole community.29
These explanations are inadequate. In what sense are the very individuals Caesar and Moses “known” to the whole community that understands their names? How exactly are we acquainted with them? How is it we understand names like “Frodo” and “Sherlock Holmes” that have no bearers, so that there is no possibility of knowing or being acquainted with the bearers? I shall argue that our knowledge begins and ends with the text that introduces those names. If the texts (The Gallic wars, The Lord of the Rings, etc.) are available to the whole community, the whole community is able to understand the names. Acquaintance with the text is both sufficient and necessary. No acquaintance with the individual is necessary, nor is it even sufficient. If I am confronted with Caesar, I do not know that this individual conquered Gaul, unless I am know that that this person is Caesar.
Hence, if our knowledge begins and ends with the text that introduces names such as “Caesar,” “Moses” and “God,” we cannot understand the proper name “God” without acquaintance with the Hebrew Bible, or some text that co-refers with it, and so cannot have a singular conception of God.
Organization of the Book
In the second chapter, I defend the co-reference thesis, arguing that there is a natural reading of a text to which all authors will try to conform, not always successfully, and this natural reading determines the co-reference of the singular terms occurring in the text. There is evidence for systematic rules or heuristics known to both author and reader, and which in principle suggests the possibility of mechanical systems or algorithms for determining co-reference. A common reference is an objective property of the text. No acquaintance or knowledge of a bearer is necessary. I claim that, in principle, a computer could analyze the text of The Lord of the Rings to determine the set of terms, which co-refer with “Frodo Baggins,” or with “Gandalf,” and so forth.
In the third chapter, I introduce the dependency and the reference theses through the puzzling phenomenon (sometimes called the puzzle of unbound anaphora) of proper names introduced by indefinite description, such as “a man named Moses” and “a woman named Martha.” It can be shown that these proper names co-refer in some sense with their indefinite antecedent, yet the antecedent itself does not refer. I claim this is because the meaning of a singular term is non-transportable:30 it co-refers with some indefinite antecedent, but the whole purpose of an indefinite term is its indifference to what came before in the order of reading, hence no singular term that occurs before the antecedent can refer forward to it in the way that a subsequent anaphor can refer back. No term prior to the antecedent can have the meaning of an anaphor term subsequent to it.31 This, and not Locke’s conception of acquaintance, is what distinguishes general terms, which are transportable, from singular terms, which are not. Singular anaphor terms are semantically dependent on the chain introduced by some indefinite antecedent, and so dependent on the text itself. They have no general dictionary-defined meaning, which we can understand as part of learning the language. Our understanding begins and ends with some text. This is the dependency thesis.
The reference thesis is that we can make a reference statement in a text where the referring term of that statement has guaranteed co-reference with the mentioned term, so that the term must itself have a non-transportable meaning. We cannot specify the reference of a term used in a narrative without that specification itself being a part of the narrative.
In chapter 4, I address the question of co-reference between texts that are not independent, that is, when a text such as the New Testament mentions or cites the Hebrew Bible, and I distinguish between citation and reference.
Chapter 5 concerns implied or imputed co-reference between independent texts, where it is not signified that the same person is a character in both texts, but where we can reasonably infer that it is the same person, or where we could write a history using information from both texts, where the co-reference was signified. For example, the identity we assume between the man called “Moses” in Exodus and the man of the same name in Numbers or Deuteronomy is signified. If the men were different, the author would have said so, therefore to understand the text at all, we have to understand the identity. But the identity we assume between the man called “Pilate” in Philo’s De Legatione ad Gaium, and the man of the same name in the Gospel account, while fairly certain, is merely probable. The identity is not part of the meaning of the separate accounts, since they were independently written by different authors. It is not as though Philo would tell us whether the man he calls “Pilate” is or is not the same as the man of the same name in the Gospels. He was almost certainly unaware of the Gospels. Likewise, the author of the Gospels does not mention Philo’s text.
I argue that history involves taking separate accounts such as this—perhaps very short accounts contained in baptismal records and other kinds of register—and imputing co-reference by converting the probable identity into semantic identity. Thus, in writing “Pilate was ordered by Tiberius to remove the shields from the palace in Jerusalem” and later “he handed Christ over to be crucified,” the historian converts a probable identity between the man who Philo said removed the shields and the man who the Gospel said handed Jesus over, into a semantic one, via the pronoun “he.” I take up the philosophical implications of such probable (i.e., contingent) identity in the following chapter.
Chapters 6 and 7 concern two corollaries of the co-reference thesis that conflict with standard semantics. Chapter 6 considers, and rejects, two contemporary philosophical theories of reference. The first is strong Millianism or “direct reference,” which holds that the proposition, the bearer of truth and falsity, is not a linguistic item, a sentence capable of truth and falsity, but a Russellian proposition: an extralinguistic item expressed by an assertoric sentence. According to this theory, the semantic value of a proper name is the bearer itself: the proposition expressed by “Peter preached in Galilee” contains both Peter and Galilee. I argue that the semantic value of a proper name consists solely in its (intralinguistic) co-reference with its anaphoric antecedents, and that because its meaning is not transportable, it can have no semantic connection to its bearer. Thus, identity statements flanked by proper names can be informative when the proper names do not co-refer. Such an identity is not like “catsup is ketchup,” where the transportable meaning of the two terms is identical.
The second theory, following from the first, is that identity statements involving proper names, if true, are necessarily true. It was first stated by Ruth Barcan Marcus in 1947, becoming widely known and accepted after Saul Kripke’s defense of it in Naming and Necessity. I reject the theory by rejecting the principle of substitution on which it depends. Even if “Cicero” refers to Cicero, and Cicero is the same person as Marcus, it need not follow that “Cicero” refers to Marcus.
Chapter 7 is about existence. The co-reference thesis implies that proper names are meaningful even when empty. A proper name acquires its meaning through guaranteed co-reference alone, and so does not need a bearer in order to have a meaning. Hence, the fideist and the atheist can meaningfully disagree, given that “God does not exist” denies a referent, but not a meaning for the name “God.” However, the thesis involves two logical problems. First, “God does not exist” implies “something does not exist” in standard logic, and “there is no such thing as God” implies “there is no such thing as something.” Second, it follows from the reference thesis that “‘God’ refers to God” is true, even if “God” has no referent, that is, even if God does not exist. Yet standard logic requires that “a R b” implies “for some x, a R x.”
I argue that the grammatical form of a reference statement differs from its logical form. The relation that is suggested by its grammatical structure, that is, between the name “Asmodeus” and some supposed demon of that name, is not the relation that makes it true. “Tobit is referring to a demon” is like “Tobit needs a wife,” which is true precisely because Tobit has no wife.
In chapter 8, I consider the objection that “God” may not be a proper name at all, but a disguised description, such as “The omnipotent omniscient being.” If so, our conception of God would available to anyone who understands the meaning of “omnipotent,” “omniscient,” and of other common ordinary language terms, and so would be transportable as I have defined it, not semantically dependent on some part of a commonly available text. The question is whether such as conception of “God” is the standard one, which I take up in the next chapter.
Chapter 9 is an extension of the co-reference thesis to names that occur in everyday written or spoken communication. This requires resolving a problem suggested by Kripke, namely that we can understand the meaning of two proper names referring to the same thing, without believing that they refer to (or designate) the same thing. I argue that, while communication media do not form a single physical text, they are constructed as though they were a single text: a virtual text. To understand any name requires a context, which requires, in turn, that the appropriate parts of the narrative, or the virtual narrative, are available. We can move from “S assents to p” to “S believes that p” so long as the name that is mentioned in the sentence assented to co-refers with the name used in the “that” clause, and where the test for co-reference involves the rules of disambiguation common to all narratives, not just physical ones.
Chapter 10 is a further extension of the co-reference thesis to demonstrative identification. The forms of reference and identification discussed so far involve an intralinguistic semantic connection between propositions that allows us to identify a character within the framework of a narrative by grasping which individual a character is the same as. All reference is, as it were, relative to some large narrative about some world. How do we know the narrative is about this world? This question prompted Strawson to eliminate story-relative identification by grounding it in some form of demonstrative identification, so that even if an individual cannot itself be demonstratively identified, “it may be identified by a description which relates it uniquely to another particular which can be demonstratively identified.”32 If we can do this, can’t we also identify God in this way, by some form of supernatural revelation? The name “God” may co-refer in some trivial way with tokens of that name in the scriptures, but why can’t it refer in some stronger, non-trivial way, through prayer or meditation, or through God’s direct action in the world? I appeal to Hume’s principle that any objects of perception may be numerically different even though they perfectly resemble each other. Perceptual information, unlike linguistic information has only indefinite content, and there is nothing in our perception of some object that signifies whether it is numerically the same as or different from any other perception. Even if there were some private perception that identified its object (such as direct revelation from God), it would be impossible to communicate the identity using public language.
The final chapter extends the co-reference thesis to thought itself. I turn to the connection between my conception of reference and the concept of worship, in order to discuss a phenomenon that has captured the imagination of philosophers for at least a hundred years: intentionality, the supposed relation of “aboutness” between thought and its object. Just as I have claimed that reference statements are illusory, so I claim intentionality is also an illusion. A reference statement like “the name ‘God’ refers to God” expresses an apparently word to world relation (that “God” refers to God), even though what makes it true is a relation between word and word (the co-reference of the term “God” as I use it, with the same term in the Hebrew Bible). Likewise, “Aashir is praying to God” appears to express a real extramental relation between Aashir and God. This is an illusion, similar to the folk belief that eyebeams are emitted from the eye. We cannot understand the name “God” and we cannot have a singular conception of God without reference to the biblical texts.
Thus, I answer the question of the book, namely whether Jews, Muslims, and Christians worship the same God. All have the same singular conception of God, because the three texts (the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran) are in a sense one. Both the New Testament and the Quran complete (and sometimes aim to correct) the text on which they are based, and it is this fact (alone) that provides a common understanding of the proper name “God,” in whatever language it is written.
NOTES
1. Durrant (The Logical Status of “God”), 2ff argues that from actual occurrences of “God” in religious language, citing examples of prayers, such as “Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee . . .” the term “God” is not a proper name. The main examples I shall use in this book are not from prayer, but rather the three scriptures themselves, but even in this prayer, it seems that “Almighty God” co-refers with “thee,” suggesting that “Almighty God” is a referring term.
2. The Quran opens “bismi al-lāhi al-rraḥmāni al-rraḥīmi,” “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.” Transliteration by Ali, The Glorious Qur’an, 6. Note that in the Arabic itself (not the transliteration), the word “God” is not the second word, given that Arabic script reads right-to-left.
3. That is, assuming that the tokens “God” and “Allah” have the same meaning in the identity statement as the same tokens in the original texts. I shall discuss the question of disquotation in chapter 9.
4. In the 1952 edition of Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Max Black and Peter Geach translated “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” as “On Sense and Reference.” The German word Bedeutung actually means “signification” or “meaning.” Peter Long and Roger White were the first to translate it as “meaning” in the English version of Frege’s Posthumous Writings. In the third (1980) edition, Geach and Black changed to “meaning” (thus “On sense and meaning”). However, as Dummett pointed out, the term “reference” could not be dislodged by a quarter of a century of philosophical discussion and commentary on Frege’s work, and the original English usage has stuck.
5. “A proper name [is] a word which answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about, but not of telling anything about it” (Mill, A System of Logic, 1. ii. 5, my emphasis). See also Prior, Objects of Thought, 155, Strawson, “On referring,” (Logico-Linguistic Papers), 1–27.
6. Ibid., Antequam musicus esset, Socrates dictus est, vel postquam filius Sophronisci non erit, Socrates dicetur.
7. Devitt, “Against direct reference” (On Sense and Direct Reference: Readings in the Philosophy of Language), 463.
8. The idea that a sentence expresses its truth value can be found as early as Frege’s Grundgesetze §32. He says that a significant sentence determines under which (truth) conditions (Bedingungen) it signifies the truth value True, and that if it does signify the True, it is a sort of name for the True, and the sense of this sentence-name is the thought is that the (truth) conditions are met. Actually the idea can be found much earlier in Buridan’s Treatise on Consequences (King 1985, Book I chapter 1), but it is doubtful that Buridan had any influence on Frege.
9. Evans, The Varieties of Reference, 10.
10. Frege, Posthumous Writings, 174, see also p. 130. Frege’s position here is somewhat muddled by his attribution of “sense” to empty terms, so that proper names can have at least some kind of meaning, as well as a designation or reference. This is irrelevant to the present discussion, but see Evans, The Varieties of Reference chapter 1 for ample Frege exegesis.
11. Geach and Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 69, except I am translating Frege’s “Bedeutung” as “significance” rather than “reference.” This is consistent with the rest of the third edition translation, which aimed to replace “reference” with meaning, with the dictionary translation, where “Bedeutung” is given as signification, meaning, standing for, and so on, and (I believe) with Frege’s intention. The passages from Frege’s comments on Schroeder are barely intelligible otherwise.
12. Frege clearly presumes that if a sentence is meaningful, then it is meaningful whether true or false. But if the sentence asserts of any of its components that the component is meaningful, and if the meaning of the sentence depends on its components, the sentence would not be meaningful if false.
13. Geach, Logic Matters, 52.
14. Ibid., 59.
15. Frege, G. (1895) “A critical elucidation of some points in E. Schroeder’s Vorlesungen Über Die Algebra der Logik,” Archiv fur systematische Philosophie, 1895, 433–56, trans. Geach in Geach & Black, 86–106, p. 454, my emphasis. See also “On concept and object,” G&B, 42 ff. “A concept . . . is predicative. On the other hand, a name of an object, a proper name, is quite incapable of being used as a grammatical predicate” (p. 43). We can, of course, say that someone is Alexander the Great. But this involves a different use of the word “is,” that is, the “is” of predication versus the “is” of identity, which I will discuss later.
16. The term is Brandom’s (Brandom, Making it Explicit, 301).
17. There is a dispute about whether Frege’s account of reference implies the standard theory, but I am not concerned here with matters of Fregean exegesis. Evans, The Varieties of Reference chapter 1 is the locus classicus.
18. Aristotle, On Interpretation, 17b1.
19. Aptus natus est praedicari de uno solo. Quine (Word and Object, 96, my emphasis) says “a singular term is one that purports to refer to just one object.”
20. Kretzmann, William of Sherwood’s Introduction to Logic, 110.
21. In Aristotelian semantics, a proposition is a type of sentence which, unlike a question or a command, is capable of truth or falsity. In Fregean semantics, the sentence expresses a proposition, an extra-mental Platonic truthbearer.
22. Traditionally, the proposition is the bearer of truth and falsity. Aristotle distinguishes (On Interpretation 17 a4) a sentence (λόγος, oratio) from a proposition (ἀπόφανσις, propositio) or declarative sentence (λόγος ἀποφαντικός, oratio enuntiativa), for only the proposition is capable of truth and falsity. Thus, a prayer is not a proposition (nor is a question or a command). He dismisses all other types of sentence in order to focus on the proposition, saying that other types of sentence are the domain of rhetoric or poetry. Contemporary philosophers take a different view of the proposition, regarding it not as a type of sentence, but rather as the meaning or thought or “Russellian proposition” expressed by the sentence. Some regard it as a wholly extralinguistic item, which includes as a component the object that the proposition is about, although Russell himself did not seem to have endorsed this. Whenever I use the word, I shall mean an assertoric or declarative sentence, a form of words in which something is propounded, put forward for consideration, and which is thus capable of being true or false, rather than a thought or a meaning. People who don’t like “proposition” can replace it mentally with “statement.”
23. Significare sequitur intelligere.
24. Frege himself acknowledged the problem: “that part of the thought which corresponds to the name ‘Etna’ cannot be Mount Etna itself. . . . For each piece of frozen, solidified lava which is part of Mount Etna would then also be part of the thought that Etna is higher than Vesuvius. But it seems to me absurd that pieces of lava, even pieces of which I had no knowledge, should be parts of my thought” (Frege, “Letter to Jourdain” in Moore, 43). See also Frege’s letter to Russell, Jena 13 November 1904, in Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, 169, where the examplar is Mont Blanc “with its snowfields.”
25. Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 323.
26. This thesis bears a superficial resemblance to the one worked out in Brandom (Making it Explicit, 305–327) and passim. Brandom argues that a reference statement like “The term ‘Leibniz’ refers to Leibniz” can be interpreted as “The one referred to by the term ‘Leibniz’ = Leibniz,” where the indirect description “The one referred to etc.” is anaphorically dependent on some previously occurring token of “Leibniz.” The resemblance is only superficial, in my view. For example, Brandom quotes with apparent approval Chastain’s claim that indefinite descriptions can be straightforwardly referential. See my discussion of this point in chapter 3.
27. This is an old argument. Quine (Methods of Logic, 199) argues that “Parthenon” names the Parthenon and only the Parthenon, whereas “the Parthenon-idea” names the Parthenon-idea. Frege (“On sense and reference,” 31) says that the sentence “The Moon is smaller than the Earth” is not about the idea of the Moon. “If this is what the speaker wanted, he would use the phrase ‘my idea of the Moon’” Earlier than that, Mill (A System of Logic, I.v.i) notes that “fire causes heat” does not mean that my idea of fire causes my idea of heat. “When I mean to assert any thing respecting the ideas, I give them their proper name, I call them ideas: as when I say, that a child’s idea of a battle is unlike the reality, or that the ideas entertained of the Deity have a great effect on the characters of mankind.” In the late thirteenth century, Duns Scotus argued that if “stone” referred to the idea of a stone, then Aristotle’s claim in De anima III “A stone is not in the soul, but the idea of a stone” would be contradictory, because “being in the soul” is first removed from the idea of a stone, which is signified by the name “stone” by the first part of the proposition, “a stone is not in the soul,” and yet in the second part, the same predicate would be attributed to the “same subject” (Duns Scotus On Time and Existence, 31, I have changed the translation from “species” to “idea”).
28. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III. iii. 3.
29. Reid, The Works of Thomas Reid, 389.
30. Sainsbury, “Fregean sense,” 136.
31. It may be objected that in English, as well as in Greek and Latin, a relative may anticipate a pronoun in such a way that the pronoun refers to a preceding or succeeding relative or vice versa. I deal with this objection in chapter 3.
32. Strawson, Individuals, 21.
