Meta and Meta

It's The Pictures That Got Small

I queried of the Enchantress whether she might not wish to join me for a movie.

"Well," she replied, "I looked in L.A. Weekly. But nothing really knocked me up."

'ic'-Less Wonder

Honestly, now, can we get over it? If we're going to make mention of the fact that President Bush shaved a syllable off the prefered phrase 'Democrat*ic* Party' as a means of tweaking his opponents, let's please do it only in the context of pointing out that this pathetic gambit just shows him to be the impotent yap that he is.

C-SPAN Polls We'd Like to See

Just now on C-SPAN 1 appeared this "Capital News Poll of the Day":

Do you think a resolution against a troop buildup "emboldens the enemy?" [sic]

I would like to see this poll question:

Do you think the suggestion that a resolution against a troop buildup "emboldens the enemy" "emboldens the enemy"?

And while they're at it:

Do you think lending credulity to the excuses of an incompetent Commander In-Chief "emboldens the enemy"?

Not to say there aren't a lot of other interesting poll questions we could come up with...

Sherlock, Superman and the Unicorn: Why (pace Kripke) a Possible-Worlds Account of Fictional Reference is Possible

Wherein Kripke's theory of fictional reference is disproved by childhood daydreams, monkeys at typewriters, and Heinrich Schliemann.

Kripke claims that a possible-worlds analysis of fictional reference cannot overcome the problem of specifying sufficiently clear identity conditions:

Granted that there is no Sherlock Holmes, one cannot say of any possible person, that he would have been Sherlock Holmes, had he existed. Several distinct possible people…might have performed the exploits of Holmes, but there is none of whom we can say that he would have been Holmes had he performed these exploits. For if so, which one? [Naming and Necessity (22).]

Kripke concludes from this that fictional reference has to be cashed out in terms of actual, but essentially fictional, abstract entities. In other words, on Kripke's account, 'Sherlock Holmes' names an abstract entity--the fictional character Sherlock Holmes. Since names are rigid designators, Holmes is necessarily fictional--fictional, that is, in all possible worlds in which Holmes exists.

I think there are three straightforward reasons to reject this argument.

First, it ignores phenomena like historical fiction and schoolboy daydreaming. Consider the latter sort of phenomenon (the argument is the same in either case). Suppose I imagine myself helping Superman out of a fix (it's just the kind of guy I am). On Kripke's account, one would have to say that I'm not really imagining myself here but rather some other fictional character who has many of the superficial properties that happen to inhere in me, and that this fictional "'Q' the Enchanter" is utterly, ontologically distinct from "Q" the Enchanter.

It seems to me that this bullet-biting account verges on incoherence. The first-person deictic rigidly designates the person using it. As such, Kripke's account renders propositions like 'I imagined I was helping Superman out of a fix' meaningless or impossible. Whereas such imaginings at least seem more like the routine product of a rather basic mental competence. (Confer, for instance, the rather natural account an appeal to possibilia makes available, viz., that in imagining myself running to Superman's aid, I am simply imagining me--a counterfactual me in a counterfactual world--as I interact with Superman, whom I imagine existing as a concrete entity in that same counterfactual world.)

Second, the problem in specifying identity conditions for fictional characters as specific possibilia is no worse than that of specifying identity conditions for fictional characters as specific abstracta. For instance, what are the conditions under which a specific abstract entity is Sherlock Holmes? It couldn't be some causal historical relationship with the author of the Holmes stories: If another author, perhaps even a monkey, had per chance typed up a word-for-word copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles (call Conan Doyle's book Hound for short and the monkey's book Hound*), one would be epistemically justified to say that 'Holmes'* in Hound* picks out the same abstract entity as 'Holmes' does in Hound. (I'm obviously not intentionalist about meaning.)

Nor could the conditions consist in the story's actual narrative content: We might imagine that Conan Doyle might have written none of the Holmes books that he actually did, but yet penned others that still use 'Sherlock Holmes' to pick out the very Sherlock Holmes his actual books do.

In short, there seems no set of identity conditions that would pick Holmes out as an abstractum any more or less succesfully than it would pick Holmes out as a possibilium.

Third, and most importantly, Kripke's claim that we can't specify the identity conditions of fictional or mythical entities is disproved by the process of historical discovery. Consider the following account of a hypothetical discovery. Archaeologist Schliemann's excavators dig up some equine-looking remains, among them an equine-looking skull with a horn protruding from the front; the remains are determined to be of completely natural origin. Nearby is found a plaque that reads

υνικορν

or something like that. (This is all anachronistic and etymologically bogus anyway, so please don't hold me to orthographic verisimilitude.) This plaque is next radiometrically dated, and found to be the same age as that of the remains. A little later, some research on the plaque turns up clues in the vast literature on Greek mythology--clues that point to a clear causal-historical chain of usage linking 'υνικορν' to 'unicorn.'

The preceding successfully outlines a set of circumstances under which we would know we had discovered the remains of a real unicorn. If there are epistemological problems here, as Kripke claims (see, e.g., pp.157-8 of Naming and Necessity), those problems are of a far more general nature than Kripke seems to appreciate, since if those problems obtain in our discovering the historicity of unicorns, they obtain also in the case of our discovering the historicity of, say, Troy (which had been thought a mythical city before Schliemann discovered it).

Optimistic Nihilism

Nothing matters. So the fact that nothing matters doesn't matter.

Might as well seize the day, then.

Message Disciples

I suppose you have, what? like a hundred million people in the U.S. who hold fundamentalist religious beliefs of the most absurd variety. This, at noon in the Age of Science.

How do they do it? Through an incredibly effective belief maintenance program.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Dummy Check

When the contents of minds are at odds, the contents of the world should be consulted.

Dreams

The dream is dead. But at least I’m awake now.

You Might Be A Redneck...

[Treoblogging] "What time did we get back last night from hunting coyotes?"

We're holed up in the Ozarks with our gracious hosts, the "Hackett" family. The guys went out in the middle of the night with Papa Hackett to hunt coyotes. Yes, that's right.

Later, they told me how Papa Hackett uses a tape recording of a squeeling rabbit to draw the coyotes in. "Curly" the Bass Player said it was "pretty horrifying." I do not doubt him.

In Other News...

[Treoblogging] Heard on the radio while somewhere between Elburn, IL and Centerville, IA:

A motorist collided with a parked car on Oak St. last Tuesday. Frank Johnson was driving west-bound on Oak and apparently did not see the automobile parked there. There were no injuries reported, but it was estimated that the damage to both vehicles could reach $500.    

In other news, police issued several citations to underage patrons at [local bar name]. Jefferson High School seniors Cindy Smith, Jackie Freeman, Jon Davis and Katie Winslip were all fined $75 for the offense....