Comment on 'Two Notions of Necessity'Author(s): Gareth EvansSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 118, No. 1/2, The Two-Dimensional Framework and Its Applications:Metaphysics, Language, and Mind (Mar., 2004), pp. 11-16Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4321459 .

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GARETH EVANS

COMMENT ON 'TWO NOTIONS OF NECESSITY'*

I confess to being a bit suspicious of the way you introduce your operator '.F', though I am quite unable to express my doubts in a compelling way.

Incidentally, I think the general ideas of your paper would be more clearly visible if you had taken as basic an operator 'Z' with the condition:

W I= Zuc iff (VW')(Vw') [if W' ~ 'W then 'W' I=wt a]

because this is closer to a necessity operator right from the start. But there are probably many refinements which would be difficult later, and it wouldn't have the same degree of continuity with the earlier paper (Crossley and Humberstone, 1977).1

Anyway, definable in terms of your apparatus is an operator 'Poss' such that 'Poss(Actually(P))' is true provided 'OP' is true (assuming P doesn't contain any descriptive names or 'Actu- ally's). And this seems to me very like an operator in tense logic 'A(Now(P))' which is true provided 'F(P)' is true.2 Within the scope of '<D', 'Now' doesn't refer to the time of utterance; so equally within the scope of 'Poss', 'Actual' doesn't refer to the actual world. Yet in all other contexts 'Now'/'Actual' are intended to have the same role. (The kind of difficulty I am getting at will also emerge with 'Julius': within the scope of 'Poss', 'Julius' will not refer to the inventor of the zip.3) Now, I am able to make sense of these forms of embedding only if I understand them as involving a quite new form [of] embedding - quite unlike those previously recognized - of the kind I attempted to characterize under T3 of my paper on tense logic.4 The semantic value of 'Poss(X)' upon an occasion of utterance, C, is not a function of the semantic value X has upon that occasion, but the semantic value X would have upon some other (potential) occasion of utterance. Now I didn't think and don't think that this form of embedding is incoherent, but I should like its distinctness from previously recognized forms to be made explicit.

LA PhilosophicalStudies 118: 11-16,2004. ? 2004 Antonia Phillips. Printed in the Netherlands.

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12 GARETH EVANS

[Actually, there may be a slight problem for understanding your 'Poss' in this way. Diagrammatically, and quantifying over proposi- tions we have

Utterance of S P ' Uterance of S=P'

PisF - -\ PisT

P' isT. P' is F

61

T3 in the tense case involves showing O(S) to be true in C1 because what S would have expressed in C2 is actually true (is true in C(1) (this is marked out with the dashed line) whereas your 'Poss' involves, on this account, the route taken by the dotted line. And it may not be easy to prevent 'utterance difficulties' from getting in the way.]5

Anyway, this is the only way I can understand 'Poss' - involving the thought of the utterance of the embedded sentence in other circumstances. So the question is: does it capture (thus understood) the notion of deep contingency. Is a sentence deeply contingent iff there is some possible circumstance in which its utterance would have produced a false* utterance? (qua sentence of the language) [* for our purposes this is all that matters] Well, provided the 'utter- ance difficulties' mentioned above can be dealt with, I think the answer is 'Yes' - but that is quite a big proviso since obviously on the most superficial reading 'I exist' would turn out to be deeply necessary.

I take it that you are opposed to this way of understanding 'Fixedly' &c. You would see a clear distinction (?) between 'Poss (Julius is Davies)' and 'To the left (I am hot)', and I am not sure that you are wrong.6 But I would be grateful for a word or two more on this.

This naturally leads me to the disagreement I might have with you over the question of the need for relativizing the relation of reference to deal with 'Julius' in your 'F' contexts. I am quite happy to allow a relativity to a context is required once we accept as legitimate such

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COMMENT ON 'TWO NOTIONS OF NECESSITY' 13

contexts. But I do not think that this marks a distinction between 'Julius' and other 'genuine' referring expressions since after all reference must be thus relativized for 'I', 'you', 'now' &c. (I'm not sure how you would expect these context-dependent referring expressions to embed inside 'F'.) Perhaps I should have said that a referring expression is any expression whose semantic contribution is dealt with by a relation of reference unrelativized save to deal with context-dependence (i.e. save to context). I still cling to the idea that there is a non-arbitrary distinction which puts 'Julius' with 'Tom', and not with descriptions.7

So you would expect me to dissent from your suggestion that a descriptive name is a conventional abbreviation for a definite description embedding 'actually'. I am impressed by the fact that we can introduce such names using the relation of reference

Let us refer to the 0 by 'a'

and that this by itself guarantees rigidity in modal and temporal contexts for if we attempt to use 'a' non-rigidly, say by uttering

You might have been a

to mean (or on the basis of) 'You might have been the O', we will be infringing the introducing stipulation, because we are certainly

not there using 'a' to refer to the 0 (or as a name for the /). And this is why I am so resistant to regarding the second relativity in the truth relation as in any way similar to the first, and why I insist on regarding it as a form of context-dependence. Because this is the only way I can reconcile the truth of 'Poss(Tom = Julius)' with the stipulation that 'Julius' should be a name of the inventor of the zip. (Cf. the remark I made about 'To the left (I am hot)' being consistent with 'I' having the role of referring to the speaker.8)

Incidentally I thought you might use your apparatus to say a word about Dummett's 'St. Anne must be a mother'.9

I thought the applications of the idea of a descriptive name and related ideas were fine. You raise a fascinating question about the difference 'acquaintance' plays in the case of water and of a partic- ular spatio-temporal individual. I have thought and written about this, but it is all too long and probably too confused to put in a letter. Io

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14 GARETH EVANS

One other minor point: 1 1 (p. 2) You write 'JAa says: whichever world had been actual, a would have been the case in the actual world'. But precisely because of the 'rigidity' of 'actual' I hear this wrong; suggest you alter it to '. . . a would have been the case in that world' .

NOTES

* Letter dated 14 July, 1979, written to Martin Davies in response to a draft version of 'Two notions of necessity'. Gareth Evans died in 1980 at the age of thirty-four. We are grateful to Antonia Phillips for her permission to publish this material. Notes have been added by MD. 1 Evans here proposes that we should take as primitive an operator equivalent to the combination 'SOD'. An alternative proposal with a similar motivation would be to take as primitive an operator equivalent to the combination 'FA'. 2 In his hand-written letter, Evans has, not 'V, but an inverted capital 'F'. 3 In 'Reference and contingency' (1979/1985), Evans considers a descriptive name, 'Julius', introduced by the stipulation: 'Let us use "Julius" to refer to whoever invented the zip' (p. 181). If, as Davies and Humberstone (1980, p. 1 1) tentatively suggest, the descriptive name 'Julius' is semantically similar to the definite description 'the actual inventor of the zip', then the reference of 'Julius' will be world-relative when 'Julius' occurs within the scope of 'F' or 'Poss'. 4 In 'Does tense logic rest upon a mistake?' (1985), Evans considers three conceptions of the semantic foundations of tense logic and, in particular, three interpretations of the temporally relative truth predicate 'truet'. According to the third of these accounts, there is a direct connection between the trutht of a sentence S and the correctness of an utterance at t of S. Given such an interpretation of truth-at-a-time, we need to consider how to understand a recursive clause such as: For any time t, and any sentence S, truet('P'AS) iff there is a time t', earlier than t, such that S is truet,. Evans says (1985, p. 357):

[I]t is important to be clear about the novelty of this proposal, for it involves the recognition of a hitherto unknown form of embedding. In all previously-studied forms of embedding . . . the semantic value which a complex sentence E (e) has in a given context is a function of the semantic value which the expression e has in that context.... But T3 asserts that the semantic value which the sentence 'P(X)' has in a context is a function of the semantic value which X would have in another context. For, on the present interpretation, the recursive clause ... says roughly that the utterance of 'P(X)' is true iff the utterance of X at some earlier time would have been true. If T3 is right, the interpretation of a tensed utterance forces us to consider the interpretation which other, perhaps only potential, utterances would have, and this is a quite unprecedented feature.

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COMMENT ON 'TWO NOTIONS OF NECESSITY' 15

5 The parenthetical worry that Evans raises here is related to the way that he improves on the 'rough' construal of the recursive clause quoted in the previous note. He explains the problem that arises with the rough construal as follows (1985, p. 358):

Any such semantics must allow that the sentence 'In the past (There are no speakers)', as uttered now, expresses a truth, and to this end it must be the case that there is a time t', earlier than now, such that 'There are no speakers' is truet,. But this cannot mean that, had someone uttered the sentence at t', he would have spoken correctly for he would not have done so.

He goes on to say that the problem - an example of what he calls 'utterance difficulties' - is 'a perfectly general one' and proposes a refined understanding of the relation between truth or correctness for utterances and truth-at-a-time for sentences (ibid., p. 360): 'We want to speak of the actual value of a potential utterance; a sentence type is truet iff, were anyone to utter it at t, what he would thereby say is (as things stand) true.' In the case of the temporal operator, 'In the past', T3 can avoid the utterance difficulty because we first consider the possible situation in which there is an utterance at t of 'There are no speakers', and then consider the truth value as things actually stand, or in the actual world, of (what is said in) that possible, or potential, utterance at t.

But it is not so easy to use this strategy for avoiding the utterance difficulty when we consider the modal operator 'Poss' instead of the temporal operator 'In the past'. The sentence '0(There are no speakers)' is surely true. So the sentence 'Poss(Actually(There are no speakers))' should also be true. As Evans understands 'Poss', this must turn roughly on the truth of an utterance, u, of 'Actually(There are no speakers)' in some other possible situation, w. But here we run into the utterance difficulty, and it cannot be avoided by adopting the refinement of considering the truth value in the actual world, @, of what is said in the utterance, u, in w. There are two reasons for this. One reason is that following Evans's dashed line back to the actual world does not help. If what is said in u is that there are no speakers, this is no more true in @ than it is in w. The second, more general, reason is that the putative refinement gives the wrong truth conditions for other sentences. Thus, for example, the sentence 'K(There are no tigers)' is surely true; so the sentence 'Poss(Actually(There are no tigers))' should also be true. As Evans understands 'Poss', this must turn roughly on the truth of an utterance of 'Actually(There are no tigers)' in some other possible situation. If what is said in such an utterance is that there are no tigers, then this may indeed be true in some possible situation; but it is certainly not true in the actual world. So it is the dotted line and not the dashed line that we need to follow. 6 Evans here alludes to an example of the 'hitherto unknown form of embedding' that he provides in 'Does tense logic rest upon a mistake?' (1985, pp. 357-358): 'Suppose that there is a language exactly like English, save that it possesses two additional operators, "To the right", and "To the left", which can be prefixed to sentences in the first person. A sentence like "To the left (I am hot)" as uttered by a speaker x at t is true iff there is at t on x's left someone moderately near who

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16 GARETH EVANS

is hot.' Evans goes on to say that the only way to understand the construction as generating these truth conditions ('while continuing to suppose that the only role of the first person pronoun is that of denoting the speaker') is to suppose that the operator 'To the left' is governed by a rule: 'To the left'AS is true, as uttered by x at t iff there is someone moderately near to the left of x such that, if he were to utter the sentence [S] at t, what he would thereby say is true (p. 358). 7 Evans here alludes to Davies and Humberstone (1980, p. 8), where the descriptive name 'Julius' is compared with an ordinary proper name, 'Tom', and with the description, 'the inventor of the zip'. 8 See again the passage from Evans (1985, p. 358) mentioned in note 6. 9 Dummett (1973, p. 113): 'After all, even though there is an intuitive sense in which it is quite correct to say, "St. Anne might never have become a parent", there is also an equally clear sense in which we may rightly say, "St. Anne cannot but have been a parent", provided always that this is understood as meaning that, if there was such a woman as St. Anne, then she can only have been a parent.' 10 In his Preface to The Varieties of Reference, John McDowell says that Evans intended 'to reinforce the chapter on proper names with a partly parallel chapter on natural-kind terms' (p. vii). This material has never been published (but see the Index of Evans, 1982, under 'Natural-kind terms and concepts'). l l Evans actually wrote 'Two other minor points'; but the second of these is a genuinely minor typographical suggestion. The first point, in contrast, connects with one of the main themes of his letter. In order to avoid the problem that Evans raises here, the printed version of 'Two notions of necessity' has (Davies and Humberstone, 1980, p. 3): 'Thus "FAa" says: whichever world had been actual, a would have been true at that world considered as actual.'

REFERENCES

Crossley, J.N. and Humberstone, I.L. (1977): 'The Logic of "Actually"', Reports on Mathematical Logic 8, 11-29.

Davies, M. and Humberstone, I.L. (1980): 'Two Notions of Necessity', Philo- sophical Studies 38, 1-30.

Dummett, M. (1973): Frege: Philosophy of Language, London: Duckworth. Evans, G. (1979): 'Reference and Contingency', The Monist 62, 161-189.

Reprinted in (1985): Collected Papers, pp. 178-213. Evans, G. (1982): The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, G. (1985): 'Does Tense Logic Rest Upon a Mistake?', in Collected Papers

(pp. 343-363), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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