Sentences, Quotation Marks, and Necessary Truth

Sentences, Quotation Marks, and Necessary TruthAuthor(s): Sheldon M. CohenSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 25, No. 4 (May, 1974), pp. 283-287Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4318848 .

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SHELDON M. COHEN

SENTENCES, QUOTATION MARKS,

AND NECESSARY TRUTH1

(Received 31 January, 1973)

1. Many of us are prepared to agree that it is necessarily true that all horses are mammals. Then our paths diverge. Some of us take that to be an unperspicacious way of rendering the following: the sentence, "all horses are mammals," is necessarily true. Some of those who take that path go on to claim that

(SI) "All horses are mammals,"

is necessarily true because some sentence similar to (S2) is true:

(S2) "The word 'horse' means, in part, 'mammal'."

These people are friends of sentences, though they are not the only friends sentences have. They deny that (S1) and (S2) are equivalent. (SI) is about horses and is a necessary truth; (S2) is about words and is a contingent truth. But, they hold, (S1) is a necessary truth only because (S2) is plain old true. And thus, that (S1) is a necessary truth is itself contingent.

This bothers the friends of propositions. If that (SI) is a necessary truth is itself contingent, then (SI) might not have been a necessary truth. (SI) might have been false. But if (S1) might have been false, there is a possible world in which (SI) is false, and therefore (S1) is not a necessary truth at all. Yet it was the necessity whereby (SI) is true that these friends of sentences set out to explain (not to explain away).

So the friends of sentences set out to explain how (SI) can be con- tingently necessary, without it following that (SI) is just contingent, and not necessary at all. They do this by drawing a distinction they believe will enable them to say what prima facie seems self-contradictory: (S1) is a necessary truth, and (S1) might have been false. In fact, various friends of sentences use various distinctions, but the central idea under- lying these distinctions is plain. Let us distinguish sentences (= sentence types), sentence tokens, and eternal sentences. The notion of an eternal

Philosophical Studies 25 (1974) 283-287. All Rights Reserved Copyright 0 1974 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland



284 SHELDON M. COHEN

sentence is borrowed from Quine, though with a difference.2 Quine takes "2+2=4" and "On July 15, 1968, it rains in Boston Mass." as both being eternal sentences; here the notion is restricted to the former kind of sentence. Still, we can say along with Quine, "when we call a sentence eternal... we are calling it eternal relative only to a particular language at a particular time." For:

an eternal sentence that was true could become false because of some semantic change occuring in the continuing evolution of our own language. Here again we must view the discrepancy as a difference between two languages: English as of one date and English as of another. The string of sounds or characters in question is, and remains, an eternal sentence in earlier English, and a true one; it just happens to do double duty as a falsehood in another language, Later English.3

We can consider, similarly, a sentence token as merely being a token of its type, and as capable of being placed within a linguistic framework, or we can consider it as already embedded within such a framework. A token of type (SI) might occur in the language spoken in some possible world, and be equivalent in that language to our "Brazil is in Africa." Some tokens of type (S1) are necessarily true; others are not. It depends upon the language in which the token occurs.

But once more, the friends of propositions are puzzled. It is a sentence token as merely a token of its type of which it is true that whether it is a necessary truth depends on linguistic conventions. As such the token has no meaning. That whether a token of that sort is necessarily true is dependent upon linguistic conventions, no one will deny. This does not seem to involve granting anything more than that whether the token is necessarily true depends upon what it means. If, on the other hand, we take our token as having the meaning it has in our language, then it is true in all possible worlds, and hence it is false that it might not have been true. And if it is false that it might not have been true, how can its truth be due to convention? When something is so by convention, it might have been otherwise, mightn't it?

And now it is the turn of the friends of sentences to be puzzled. In discussing (S1) we are mentioning, not using, a sentence. Granted that when we use it, it is necessarily true; it is still a contingent fact that that sentence, when used, is necessarily true.

At this point a partial agreement can be had. Tokens of sentences (S1) happen to be necessarily true in our language. The friends of proposi-



SENTENCES, QUOTATION MARKS, AND NECESSARY TRUTH 285

tions hold that they happen to be necessarily true because they happen to express a proposition that is necessarily true, but they also hold that that proposition is necessarily true is not contingent upon anything. Our friends of sentences hold that those tokens happen to be necessarily true because they happen to be governed by the conventions that govern them. They both agree that that any tokens of the sentence are necessarily true is not itself necessarily true. And that is what I want to call into question. Both friends of sentences and friends of propositions accept (3):

(3) If 'horse' did not mean what it means, "all horses are mammals" might not have been true.

I want to suggest that there may be a simpler way of handling the issue, for I am beginning to doubt the truth of (3). 2. When I wrote (S1) I was mentioning, and not using, the sentence. For I did not write

(S1) All horses are mammals,

but

(S1) "All horses are mammals."

What follows from the fact that I was mentioning a sentence? There is a philosophical convention according to which, when I throw quotes around the words all horses are mammals, I am then dealing with scratches. But I did not invoke that convention. My paper is in the ordinary mode; my quotation marks are not to quotation marks what technical terms are to terms. When one invokes that philosopher's convention, one's quotation marks become technical terms, saying, "Here I am mentioning scratches." If one does not invoke that convention, is one still mentioning scratches?

Suppose this paper were to be translated into German. How should the word horse be translated when it occurs in quotes? According to some people, it should be left unchanged, because when it occurs in quotes it is being mentioned. It certainly is being mentioned, but it normally should and would turn up in the German version as Pferd in quotes. "The word 'horse"' is unlike "the mark '#"', for it is "das Wort 'Pferd"' but "das Zeichen '# "'. This suggests that normally when



286 SHELDON M. COHEN

we talk about a written sentence we are not just talking about a sign design.

In an article on Carnap4 Church pointed out that (1) Seneca said that man is a rational animal does not follow from (6) There is a language S' such that Seneca wrote as a sentence of S' words whose translation from S' into English is "Man is a rational animal". The German translation of (1) is (1') Seneca hat gesagt, dass der Mensch ein verniinftiges Tier sei, while in the German translation of (6), "Man is a rational animal" must be translated as "Man is a rational animal," not "Der Mensch ist ein verniiftiges Tier." But Church also claimed that (2) Seneca wrote the words "Man is a rational animal", is false. Only if we are always invoking the philosopher's convention. And as the Delphic oracle said, "Nothing in excess."

We must distinguish three things where in the past we have distinguish- ed two. At one extreme is Seneca said that man is a rational animal, in which no sentence is mentioned. At the other extreme is Seneca said the English sentence "Man is a rational animal". Somewhere between these two are sentences such as "He said, 'I am going"' or "Seneca said, 'Man is a rational animal"'. This latter class seems to consist of those sentences in which a sentence is mentioned, but in which it is accidental to the point of the sentence that the mentioned sentence happens to be in the language in which it is, as would not be the case with "He said, 'Ich gehe"'. In sentences of this third type, what is mentioned is not merely a sign-design, but a sign-design as having a certain meaning, and in translating such sentences the mentioned sentence is replaced by the sign- design that has that meaning in the language into which one is translating.5

Now the token of type (S1) that occurs in (3) of this paper occurs in (3) as a case of our third type. The paper does not say that it is in English; it says that it is in this language (whatever this language might happen to be). If the token of type (SI) occurs in (3) in this third way, then what is being mentioned is a sign-design understood as having a certain meaning. And the friends of sentences have granted that if (SI) is taken as having the meaning it has in our language, then (S1) is true in all possible worlds. And if (S1) as occuring in (3) is true in all possible worlds, then (3) is false. It is a different sentence, though graphically the same as (S1), that might not have been true if 'horse' did not mean what it means. That different sentence does not exist in our language.



SENTENCES, QUOTATION MARKS, AND NECESSARY TRUTH 287

The friends of sentences may be using 'sentences' as a technical term. What they call 'sentences' may be what their technical quotation marks select. Granted that technical sense, what they say about what they call 'sentences' might very well be true (and non-controversial). But what is true of what they call 'sentences' is not always true of sentences.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

NOTES

1I would like to thank my good friends, William R. Carter of North Carolina State University, Michael P. Hodges of Vanderbilt University, and P. S. Starkraving, for their criticisms and suggestions concerning this paper. 2 W. V. 0. Quine, Philosophy of Logic, Prentice-Hall, 1970, pp. 13-14; Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia Univ. Press, 1969, pp. 139-143; and Word and Object, MIT Press, 1960, Section 40. Of course, my friends of sentences are not Quinians. 3 Philosophy of Logic, loc. cit. 4 'On Carnap's Analysis of Statements of Assertion and Belief', Analysis 10, 5 (1950), reprinted in Reference and Modality (ed. by Linsky), Oxford Univ. Press, 1971. 5 Quine, commenting on Church's argument (Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 22), says that it "'rests on the notion of linguistic equivalence, or sameness of meaning...". The same might be said of my remarks; certainly I have not avoided the word 'meaning'. But that may just be a matter of convenience. I think the same point could be made by talking solely about what translators in fact do, and about how the word 'sentence' is used in our language.



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Sentences, Quotation Marks, and Necessary Truth