Leo Carton Mollica e-mails:
Your most recent post (for which many thanks) inspired the below-expressed argument, and I was curious as to your opinion of it . . . . I think it has something behind it, but right now I feel uncertain about my examples in (2).
0. There is something curious about the relation between a proposition or declarative sentence and the terms or words that compose it: the list L ("Christ," "Judas," "betrays") clearly differs, at the very least in not having a truth value, from the sentence "Judas betrays Christ," yet nothing immediately presents itself as the ground G of this difference. One plausible candidate for G is some kind of union or togetherness amongst the members of L present in "Judas betrays Christ" and not in L itself, but this proposal is open to a serious challenge.
1. Suppose we accept Barry Miller's thesis, from "Logically Simple Propositions," that some declarative sentences have only one semantic element. His favorite such sentence is the Romanian "Fulgura," whose only constituent word translates (if I remember aright) the English "brightens," and which is interesting in requiring no actual or implied subject to form a complete sentence (like "It's raining" in English, but without the dummy subject).
2. Now, the lone word in "Fulgura" seemingly can occur outside any proposition. If, for example, someone were to ask me to recite my favorite Romanian word, or to translate "brightens" into Romanian, it would be strange to take me as telling them something false, or to have them respond "No, it isn't," upon my replying with "fulgura." There would, however, be nothing strange about the sentence "Fulgura" being false and someone telling me as much. [. . .]
3. Even in such simple sentences, therefore, there is a distinction between the sentence and the words contained therein, for one can be had without the other. But the ground of this distinction cannot be any union or togetherness among the words that enter into the sentence for the simple reason that no union or togetherness amongst items can be had without distinct items to unify or bind together. It can, therefore, be at least plausibly argued that the general ground of the difference between a sentence and its constituent words is no kind of union or togetherness.
I take Mr Mollica's basic argument to be this:
a. If there are logically simple sentences/propositions, then the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.
b. There are logically simple sentences/propositions.
Therefore
b. There are logically simple sentences/propositions.
Therefore
c. The problem of the unity of the proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.
My response is to reject (b) while granting (a). I discussed the question of logically simple sentences/propositions with Barry Miller back in the '90s in the pages of Faith and Philosophy. My "Divine Simplicity: A New Defense (Faith and Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 4, October 1992, pp. 508-525) has an appendix entitled "Divine Simplicity and Logically Simple Propositions." Miller responded and I counter-responded in the July 1994 issue, pp. 474-481. It is with pleasure that I take another look at this issue. I will borrow freely from what I have published. (Whether this counts as plagairism, depends, I suppose, on one's views on diachronic personal identity.)
A. A logically simple proposition (LSP) is one that lacks not only propositional components, but also sub-propositional components.Thus atomic propositions are not logically simple in Miller's sense, since they contain sub-propositional parts. A proposition of the form a is F, though atomic, exhibits subject-predicate complexity.
B. Miller's examples of LSPs are inconclusive. Consider the German Es regnet ('It is raining'). As Miller correctly notes, the es is grammatical filler, and so the sentence can be pared down to Regnet, which is no doubt grammatically simple. He then argues:
Now there is no question of Regnet being a predicate; for as a proposition it has a complete sense, whereas as a predicate it could have only incomplete sense. Hence, Regnet and propositions like it seem logically simple. (Barry Miller, "Logically Simple Propositions," Analysis, vol. 34, no. 4, March 1974, p. 125.)
I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Miller is confusing propositions with the sentences used to express them. Regnet and fulgura are grammatically simple. But it scarcely follows that the propositions they express are logically simple. What makes them one-word sentences is the fact that they express propositions; otherwise, they would be mere words. So we need a sentence-proposition distinction. But once that distinction is in place then it becomes clear that grammatical simplicity of sentence does not entail logical simplicity of the corresponding proposition.
C. It is also unclear how any intellect like ours could grasp a proposition devoid of logical parts, let alone believe or know such a proposition. To believe that it is snowing, for example, is to believe something logically complex, albeit unified, something formulatable by some such sentence as 'Snow is falling.' So even if there were logically simple propositions, they could not be accusatives of minds like ours. And if propositions are defined as the possible accusatives of propositional attitudes such as belief and knowledge, then the point is stronger still: there cannot be any logically sinple propositions.
D. So it seems to me that 'the problem of the list' or the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is one that pertains to every sentence/proposition. It is a problem as ancient as it is tough, and, I suspect, absolutely intractable. For a glimpse into the state of the art, I shamelessly recommend my June 2010 Dialectica article, "Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition."
Leave a Reply to Steven Cancel reply