Lecture: Counterfactuals and Kant Sellars Thesis

Uses Principia Mathematica notation which takes some time to learn.

Goodman has let the formalism of classical extensional logic mislead him in thinking about counterfactuals. He thought we could build up to counterfactuals from extensional logical vocabulary. The kind that can be built up by extensional logical vocabulary Sellars calls subjunctive identicals.

Goodman is impressed in Fact fiction and Forecast, with the difference between the claim ‘All copper melts at 1084 oC’ and ‘all the coins in my pocket are copper’. The first supports counterfactual reasoning (“if this coin in my pocket were copper, it’d melt at 1084 oC") whereas if this nickel coin were in my pocket, it wouldn’t be made of copper. However we can do some limited form of counterfactual reasoning: “if I pulled a coin out of my pocket, it would be copper”. We can always rephrase such counterfactuals (accidental generalizations) as a statement about something identical to an actual object. (The distinction is less sharp between genuine counterfactuals and subjunctive identicals is less sharp than he thinks, according to Brandom)

Makes distinction.

Defines a disposition.

• Subjunctive conditional: if \(X\) were \(\psi\)’d, it would \(\phi\).

  • (example?)

• Counterfactual conditional: if \(X\) had been \(\psi\)’d, it would have \(\phi\)’d.

  • These are both counterfactuals but very different:

    • If Oswalt didn’t shoot Kennedy, then some one else did.

    • If Oswalt didn’t shoot Kennedy, then someone else would have.

Linked by

• Counterfactuals and dispositions: source

1. A kind term

   • More than a mere predicate: in addition to criteria of application, also have criteria of identity and individuation.

   • Two flavors: proper individuating terms as well as mass terms (which requires something like ’cup of’ to individuate)

2. Condition term

3. Intervention term

4. Result term

Canonical example: “If you put the sugar in water, it will dissolve.”

Distinct from a capacity claim: “Sugar has the capacity to dissolve" is a claim that there exists a condition and intervention such that the result obtain.

Linked by

• Counterfactuals and dispositions: source

Sellars first big idea: what was needed was a functional theory of concepts (especially alethic/normative modalities), which would make their role in reasoning, rather than their supposed origin and experience their primary feature. Sellars takes modal expressions to be inference licenses.

Jerry Fodor’s theory of semantic content in terms of nomological locking: can’t directly say anything about modality directly. Not alone: Dretske and other teleosemantic literature. Sellars wants to argue this program will never work.

An axial idea of Kant: the framework that makes description possible has features which we can express with words (words whose job is not to describe¹ anything, but rather to make explicit features of the framework within which we can describe things).

The framework is often characterized with laws. With alethic modal vocabulary on the object side, normative vocabulary on the subject side.

Kant is concerned with features that are necessary conditions of the possibility of applying descriptive contents. How are statements like that sensibly thought of as true or false? (where the home language game is ordinary descriptive language) Kant says yes, in a sense, but have to be careful. If these kinds of claims are knowledge, what kind of justification is involved in it? Can we think of them as expressing even a kind of empirical knowledge? (after all, we learned laws of nature empirically, it seems). We have to think about the relationship between the framework and what you can say, in the framework, and what you can say about the framework. Kant was the first one worried about all that stuff. Sellars wants to find a meta framework for talking about the relations between talk within that framework of description, and talk about that framework of description.

Semantic nominalism was universally held until Kant. (philosophy today hasn’t yet graduated from its Humean to its Kantian phase)

If you could argue that standing in counterfactually, robust inferential relations to other descriptive terms, was an essential feature of the descriptive content of a concept (and you could argue that modal vocabularies had the expressive job of making those explicit), then you’d be in a position to argue for the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality. That would be to say that the expressive job of modal vocabulary is to make explicit the inferential relations between descriptive concepts (these are invisible to the empiricist).

Fork in road: Hume+Quine, or Kant+Sellars.

Labels are not descriptions. There’s more to describing than labeling.

Consider mere labels. Elements on a tray have red or blue dots. Have they been described? If so, what have they been described as? If we add things to the tray, we don’t know whether they deserve red or blue labels. At the very least, descriptions need a practice for applying to new cases. We can throw that in but still not have a description.

Suppose I’m trying to give you the concept of gleeb. I give you an infalliable gleebness tester. Do you have a description?

Sellars: “It’s only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, locate those objects in a space of implications that they describe it all rather than merely label.”

This is what a mere classifier have.

What’s the difference between me and a parrot who has been trained to say ‘red’ when presented a red object. The parrot isn’t describing, but I am because my noise is situated in a space of implications: something follows for me from classifying that thing is red (that it’s colored that it’s spatially extended, that if it’s a Macintosh Apple, it’s right). And furthermore, other things can be evidence for the claim that it Scarlet is evidence for it or that it’s a right Macintosh, Apple is evidence for it. And it excludes other classifications. That monochromatic patch is not green, if it’s red, and so on.

The classifier focuses only on the circumstances of application, not the consequences of application. A way to answer what the red and blue dots describe an element as is to say what follows from something having a blue or red dot (e.g. things labelled red are to be discarded). Now we have some descriptive content associated with the label.

Verificationism / classical american pragmatism focused purely on the consequences of application.

To say we need both circumstances and consequences is to say that the inferences the concept plays into is an essential part of a concept.

If the only inferences we could make were truth functional relations, then a gleeb detector like thing could be sufficient to capture the concept of gleeb fully; however, we care about counterfactually robust inferences.

You can’t count as understanding (i.e. grasp the meaning of) any descriptive expression / concept, unless you distinguish at least some of the inferences that it’s involved (i.e. some of the connections within that space of implications) as counterfactually robust (i.e. ones that would still obtain, even if something that is true wasn’t, or something that isn’t true was). The claim is not that there are particular counterfactual inferences you need, but that you need at least some to have the concept.

Examples:

• Chestnut trees produce chestnuts

  • Unless they’re immature / blighted

  • Whether or not it’s raining on them now wouldn’t affect the fact that chestnut trees produce chestnuts

• Dry, well-made matches light if you strike them

  • Not if there’s not enough oxygen

  • The position of a distant beetle on a tree that doesn’t affect whether this match lights

• The hungry lioness would chase the nearby Gazelle

  • Not if it were struck by lightning

  • But it would, whether or not the hyena were watching it

Q: do we have to have overlap in our distinctions we made to communicate about the same concept? A: The conceptual content itself is a norm that settles which inferences are correct and which are incorrect. Then, you and I may have different views about where that line is drawn. And what makes it possible for us to communicate (to agree or to disagree) is that we’ve bound ourselves by the same norm by using the same word. You may think the melting point of copper is different from what I think it is. But we can still be disagreeing about copper because there’s a fact of the matter about what you’re committed to, on that issue, when you use the word ‘copper’.

Q: Is this a counter-example? You are asked to bring a thing to your lab (it just landed from an alien planet - you can’t make any inferences about it). A: It’s complicated. Firstly, ‘thing’ or ‘object’ is not a sortal - you can’t count them (they’re pro-sortals, placeholders for sortals). If we supply one (e.g. place-occupying piece of mass - which would suffice give us some counterfactually robust inferences). If you don’t supply one, you haven’t thought about it. Related to Wittgenstein’s plate example.

Kant says concepts are rules for judgment we bind ourselves by. That doesn’t settle the question of how much of the law we need to know in order to bind ourselves by it. I don’t have to know much about molybdenum to refer to molybdenum.

Semantic paradigm is the “name-bearer” relationship. E.g. the ‘Fido’-Fido relation, between the name ‘Fido’ and the dog, Fido. Predicates/properties are just names that stick to the set.

If we stick together labels, we get descriptions (not a primitive name bearer relation, but one we can understand in terms of name-bearer relations). That’s what language lets us do. Describe/classify things (as falling under languages).

Sellars calls this descriptivism: what you do with language is describe things.

You find this not only in anglophone tradition but also in a pure form in Hussurl / semiotics. Derrida rejects Hussurl because there are some phenomena that can’t be related by sign-signified relations, but he addresses it by saying it’s all signs.

Kant found sentences special: you don’t describe things with them, you say things with them. Theory of judgment. The Tractatus has no room for statements of natural law. For normative statements, it retreats into mysticism.

Semantic nominalism is atomistic - the relation of a name and its bearer doesn’t turn on anything else.

Linked by

• From labels to descriptions: related to Sellars
• Hume's Predicament: related to Hume
• Related:
• Minimize ontology talk: referenced

From three premises:

1. what you need to move from labeling to describing is situation in a space of implications

2. space of implications must draw lines between implications that will between counterfactual circumstances under which the implication would still be good, and those in which wouldn’t

3. the expressive job, not in the first instance, a descriptive job that’s characteristic of modal vocabulary is to make explicit those range those implications and those ranges of counterfactual robustness

Put another way, suppose Sellars is right that modal expressions function as inference licenses. If it could be argued that those counterfactually robust inferences are essential to articulating the content of ordinary empirical descriptive concepts, then you’d have an argument to the effect that the capacity to use modal concepts what modal concepts make explicit is implicit already in the use even of ordinary empirical, descriptive, non modal concepts.

It’s explicit in Sellars, all but explicit in Kant. Some consequences:

• modal vocabulary is not something that you can casually add to ordinary descriptive vocabulary, like culinary vocabulary. Rather, the distinctive expressive job of modal vocabulary is to articulate the inferential connections among descriptive concepts in virtue of which they have the content that they do.

• just in being able to use ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, non modal vocabulary anyone already knows how to do everything they need to know how to do in order to use modal vocabulary. They merely make explicit what is implicit in non-modal concepts.

• One cannot be in the predicamant that Hume took himself to be in. We can teach you how to use modal vocabulary. You may not have a word for it yet. That’s what we’ll give you. But you already know how to do everything you need to know how to do to use that word to talk with ‘necessity’, ‘possibility’ and the subjunctive.

• Description and explanation are two sides of one coin.

Linked by

• Modal revolution in 20th century: relevance

Revolution in Anglophone philosophy, taking three phases:

1. Kripke’s possible-worlds semantics for modal logic (algebraic properties accessibility relation determine which modal system we’re in)

   1. Quine was a skeptic of modal talk, said that we didn’t know what we really meant when talking about it.

   2. His concerns became unpopular with this development, as Kripke’s semantics gave people the impression that we had a grasp on what we meant (in fact, alethic modal talk became the philosophical ground level for explaining other puzzling things (such as intentionality)).

   3. Quine thinks his objection is not yet satisfied; of course we can explain modal concepts in terms of other modal concepts - what do we mean by possible world? What do we mean by accessibility?

2. The previous development is only for modal logic, but Montague, David Kaplan, David Lewis, Stalnaker, etc. extended it to work for non-logical semantics as well. For example:

   • In Lewis’ General Semantics [2], if we decide to treat objects as semantic interpretant of our names, sets of possible worlds as the semantic interpretant of our sentences, then one-place predicates correspond to functions from objects to sets of possible worlds.

   • ‘walks’ is a function from objects to the worlds in which that object is walking.

   • adverbs, like ‘slowly’, is a function from one-place predicates to one-place predicates.

   • This apparatus gives us a way to talk precisely about certain distinctions that come up in philosophy language. E.g. adverbs come in two flavors:

     • Attributive: ‘walked slowly’ which implies one walked at all

     • Non-attributive: ‘walked in one’s imagination’

3. Kripke’s Naming and Necessity [3]

   • Introduced us to contingent a priori and metaphysical necessity

Brandom says: the second is the most important, but Quine’s objection was not addressed by Kripke’s semantics nor the fact that it’s useful in semantics to be able to use Kripke’s apparatus. The reason why we should have gained comfortablity with alethic modal language is actually the Kant-Sellars thesis, which dispels empiricist worries of modal concepts being unintelligible.

But hardly anyone knows about that argument. If they did, it would color our current focuses and interests. For the Kant-Sellars thesis pertains to causal/physical modalities. But nowadays, the center of philosophical thought worries about logical modalities and metaphysical modalities - causal modality is boring to them. “We’re distracted by the shiny, new playground that Kripke offered us and lost sight of the modality that’s philosophically most significant."

Sellars take the dialectic through many turns instead of just saying what he thinks. He pretends to be even-handed until deciding to focus on tweaking Mr E.’s theory to make it work.

Need to distinguish four related types of claims:

1. The practical endorsement of infering that things are \(B\)’s from their being \(A\)’s.

   • This is presupposed by the act of describing (Kant-Sellars thesis)

2. The explicit statement that one may infer the applicability of \(B\) from the applicability of \(A\)

   • This can be asserted without understanding the expressions \(A\) and \(B\)

   • I.e., it’s syntactic; just a statement about the use of language

   • Someone who doesn’t speak German can still say “If \(x\) is ‘rot’, then \(x\) is ‘farbig’."

3. The statement that \(A\) physically entails \(B\)

4. The statement that \(A\)’s are necessarily \(B\)’s.

Mr E was getting the content of modal statements wrong; they aren’t about language.

That some inference is ok is something that is conveyed by a modal claim, but it is not what is said. (Analogy: John says/asserts/means “The weather is good today”, but John conveys “John thinks the weather is good today” and John does not say “John thinks the weather is good today.”). Related to this quote.

What Sellars’ conclusion ought to be: what one is doing in making a modal assertion is endorsing a pattern of material inference. No need to take a stand on semantics. This is an expressivist view of modal vocabulary. Analogous to expressivism in ethics: what you are doing in saying someone ought to do \(X\) is endorsing doing \(X\). We can try to understand the semantic/descriptive content² in terms of what one is doing when we use the expressions.

Sellars wants to say it is the correctness of inferences connecting descriptive terms that make modal claims. Simultaneously, modal claims do not say anything about inferences.

It’s important that notion of saying is wider than describing. This is the denial of semantic descriptivism.

The pragmatic force associated with the modal claim is endorsing a pattern of inference.

What one says is that being a \(B\) follows from being an \(A\). This is not a statement about inferences, it is a statement about a consequential relation. When one says “\(x\) being copper is incompatible with \(x\) being an insulator", one is making a claim about the world (even if it is not describing it in the narrow sense). These are facts about what follows from what in the world. Given the auxillary hypothesis that our word ‘copper’ means copper, there are things we can say about inferences, but the fact that we need that auxillary hypothesis is proof that the statement itself isn’t about inferences.

So modal claims are descriptive in the wide sense but not the narrow sense.

There are some serious concerns, though. Consider "There exist causal connections which have not yet been discovered". This is analogous to accepting the early emotivist line in ethics (thinking ‘ought’ is a perfectly good concept, though not a descriptive one ... such that ‘Everybody ought to keep promises’ contextually implies a wish, on the speaker’s part, that promise keeping were a universal practice), and was then confronted with such statements as “There are obligations which have not yet been recognized” and “Some of the things we think of as obligations are not obligations”

Quote: “It is therefore important to realize that the presence in the object language of the causal modalities (and of the logical modalities and of the deontic modalities) serves not only to express existing commitments, but also to provide the framework for the thinking by which 303 we reason our way (in a manner appropriate to the specific subject matter) into the making of new commitments and the abandoning of old. And since this framework essentially involves quantification over predicate variables, puzzles over the ‘existence of abstract entities’ are almost as responsible for the prevalence in the empiricist tradition of ‘nothing-but-ism’ in its various forms (emotivism, philosophical behaviorism, phenomenalism) as its tendency to assimilate all discourse to describing.”

If we are to take causal modalities, seriously / at face value, we’re going to have to worry about what abstract objects and what properties are.

Brandom thinks Sellars could have a simpler/more satisfying conclusion to the essay, but Sellars’ nominalism (denial of existence for abstract objects/properties) prevents him from doing so.

In Brandom’s view, material inferences are not monotonic. The job of some scientific languages is to find concepts where we can state monotonic consequence relations. We can do that in fundamental physics, but hardly ever in the special sciences.

Hegel says, “By conceptual, I mean, what’s articulated by relations of determinant negation³ and mediation⁴".⁵ He says, the objective world, as it is, independently of our activities, is conceptually articulated. It has a conceptual structure because he’s a modal realist about it.

He thinks there are laws of nature. He thinks some things really follow from other things. For instance, that if a body with finite mass is accelerated, then a force was applied to it. he thinks that’s a consequence, and the remaining relatively at rest, and having a force supplied you those are incompatible. Those are incompatible properties.

So he says, the objective world has a conceptual structure already that has nothing to do with our conceiving activity. We can see that as something else. Yes, our commitments can also stand in relations of material consequence and in compatibility, but the world, just as it comes, is already in conceptual shape.

Let ‘possible world’ mean a physically possible world⁶. This conceptual apparatus can be thought of simply as a way of expressing what it is for two properties to be incompatible or to stand in a material consequential relation.

So we can express (in the language of possible worlds) the fact that it follows from (as a consequence) something’s being copper that it melts at 1084 oC, for example.

David Lewis is presented as an example of misusing possible world semantics. He discards the connection between inference and the possible worlds. He takes the descriptivist position that all one can do is describe with language, but then says he is not an actualist (you can describe non-actual worlds in the same sense that you can describe the coin in your pocket as copper).

What is lost by merging description in the narrow sense and description in the wide sense? The connection to semantics. We’ve also gained an additional problem of justifying our claims to knowledge of the non-actual worlds.

Linked by

• Commentary: Referenced