The main building of the university, venue for the Graduate conference

Time for the second part of my Germany report. This concerns the combination of a graduate conference and research workshop with Scott Soames, entitled ‘Meaning, Modality and Apriority’. The events took place in Cologne 17-20 May 2010. Photos from both events are up in my Gallery. I gave a paper in the research workshop, with the title ‘The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements’ (a slightly revised draft). Soames agreed with much of my criticism, although I was perhaps a bit provocatively pushing him closer to deflationism about modality than I was entitled to — in any case he conceded that the kind of essentialist picture that I sketched in the paper is on the right lines.

Scott Soames: Truth, Propositions and Possible World States

The organisation was top notch, although it was a pity that we couldn’t stay in the same venue for both events. I enjoyed all three events, but the conference marathon started to take its toll on me already during the graduate conference. The graduate conference included seven talks with dedicated comments and they were quite good in general, although I didn’t find any of the papers extraordinary. I think that on this post I will focus on Scott Soames’ keynote lecture and the discussion at the workshop rather than individual talks.

Soames has got two new books forthcoming very soon. One of them is entitled What Is Meaning?, the other Philosophy of Language. We got excerpts of both books before the workshop, and Soames talked about related matters in his keynote lecture as well. The topic is rather less interesting for me than Soames’ work on modality and apriority, but it was interesting to get this sneak preview and I think that there is something here that I could latch on to.

I won’t go into this in much detail, but basically Soames is defending a realist account on the nature of propositions: he thinks that propositions are ‘event types instances of which are events in which agents perform cognitive acts that are inherently representational’. Soames defends the view in some detail against the traditional Frege-Russell account on one hand and a modern deflationary view of propositions on the other hand. However, he does not really elaborate what the ontological status of propositions is according to his view. I tried to get into the bottom of this by asking whether he thinks that propositions have an existence independently of the agents’ cognitive acts. There are some problems with either answer to this question. If propositions do have an independent existence, how and where exactly do they exist? Are they abstract objects? Is there a Platonic realm of propositions? If they do not have an independent existence, then it seems that propositions just come in and out of existence according to the cognitive acts of the agents, which might have undesirable consequences as well.

Soames replying to comments

Be that as it may, more needs to be said regardless of how one might answer this question. Soames, though, wishes to remain non-committal: he said that he’s happy to commit to non-existing propositions and it seemed as if he might be willing to conceive of them as abstract objects of some kind. When pushed towards Platonism, Soames becomes a little bit uneasy, as it, understandably, strikes him as mysterious. So, I think that we can ask more from Soames in this regard, and it might also be an interesting project to examine the ontological options available to him.

Another theme that came up in the workshop was Soames’ view that we can quantify over non-existents. Basically this is based on a substitutional rather than an objectual reading of the existential quantifier. The difference can be illustrated by considering the sentence ‘There is at least one thing which is F’. On an objectual reading, the sentence is true just in case some object in the domain of discourse is F, whereas on the substitutional reading the sentence is true just in case there is some true sentence of the form ‘a is F’, where ‘a’ is a singular term (this is how Lowe puts it).

My talk at the research workshop: The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements

Now, I was rather surprised and pleased at the same time that Soames is a proponent of the substitutional reading, as I am also more sympathetic to it, as are E. J. Lowe and Kit Fine. Now, since Soames thinks that we can can quantify over non-existents, the question arises: what can we know about non-existent objects? Can we know something about their essential properties? I put this question to Soames, and he said: yes, we must be able to know something about the essential properties of non-existents. This indeed seems to be an obvious requirement, as otherwise we wouldn’t be able to individuate them. Here I am reminded of Lowe’s saying ‘essence precedes existence’. My interest in this is that Soames seems to be very close the the Lowe-Fine view of essence here, or it would at least be fairly easy to push him towards that direction, which is good news of course!

So much for that. Numerous other issues came up during the events and I really enjoyed most of the discussion. But I’d like to keep these blog posts at least reasonably brief, so this will have to do for now. I think that I will return to these two mentioned themes at some point though.

Next up: a more general, non-philosophical report of my trip to Germany, and some more photos.