More on Ephesians 5 and Principles of Interpretation and Application of Scripture

It's commonplace for Christians to take the Bible as speaking directly to them - to individualize and personalize whatever is written and read it as addressed particularly to me in my current context (however wide or narrow I may take that). In this, Christians have a lot in common with the early Rabbis (and later ones, I believe) and certainly with certain strands in Paul and the rest of the New Testament. How we read in this way and how we take into account the fact that the human authors of the Bible did not, generally, have me in particular as their direct addressee, will differ, however. In what way we take the Bible to be addressed to me in particular is very important and has ramifications for the theological and ethical interpretation of the Bible. In my opinion, the Bible is addressed to me in particular in that the Holy Spirit uses the Bible to speak to me - words that were not originally addressed to me and perhaps with a different meaning are reused by the divine activity within me to address me in my particular situation. This, I think, retains both the freedom of God to speak to my current situation in Scripture while also retaining the integrity of the Scripture's original meaning. A lot of people, however, do maintain this sort of distinction in practice and treat Scripture as if in its original meaning it was speaking directly to me personally.

Another problem is to confuse description and prescription. Pastors must often appeal to this distinction when our favorite Bible saint obviously acts not-so-saintly, but otherwise the distinction unfortunately tends to get ignored. That the early church is described in Acts as doing things a certain way (or not doing it, as the case may be), for instance, does not tell us necessarily whether that is how we are to do things - i.e., description is not prescription. Telling us that something is happening a certain way (or will happen or did happen) is not the same as telling us that things should be thus and so or that we should do such and such.

The Ephesians 5 passage on wives and husbands, which I discussed in my last post, is a nice case to look at in regards to both the above problems. This passage, as hinted at in the other post, is a flashpoint in the gender wars going on in Evangelicalism today. On one side are the Egalitarians, who uphold things like women's ordination and functional equality in the home (anti-patriarchal, in other words). On the other are the Complementarians, who (at least for some of them) are against women's ordination and uphold things like patriarchal household structure as a Scriptural norm to be followed.

Ephesians 5, I maintain, is actually a difficult passage to use for either side, despite its current wide use. As argued previously, it first of all does not contain a single command for wives to submit - it merely says that they are or will do so (in other words, it describes but does not prescribe submission). But what about the whole "the husband is head of the wife" thing? Well, there's a big debate here over the meaning of "head" in Greek (kephale), which some Egalitarians argue always or almost always lacks any connotation of hierarchy (unlike the word for "head" in Latin, Hebrew, or English, all of which have exactly that connotation). Let's set that debate aside, however, and simply assume for the moment that the Greek word has the same meaning as the English one and here indicates a position of leadership or power over the household. What then?

Well, notice that the language here is actually on its surface at least descriptive, not prescriptive. Paul says, "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ of the church," but does not say "the husband should be the head of the wife as Christ of the church." That does not mean Paul did not think the latter or did not mean for us to believe it, just that he did not go out and write it, which makes it more difficult to argue that this is some kind of norm for the Christian family just from this passage. What Paul says, however, is also consistent with the thinking that, though the husband is head of the wife, that is not how things should be and that such an arrangement should be avoided where possible (ceterus paribus, of course).

Note also that we ought to avoid the problem noted in the first paragraph of this post. Paul uses the present tense to describe male headship. But, of course, Paul wrote in the first century, not the twenty-first! Which means, Paul is not even necessarily describing the current state of things but rather the way things were in the first century (and perhaps in an even smaller context than that even - he probably did not have in mind Native American societies, for instance, in his description - though, on the other hand, he may indeed have intended his description universally - unfortunately the text is not specific enough to tell for sure). In first century Asia Minor, his intended addressee, the male was indeed the head of the household. Both Jewish and Gentile cultures here were thoroughly patriarchal, after all. It is a mistake, then, to see a translation like "The husband is head of the wife" and automatically assume that Paul is saying this about our current time. Maybe he meant it as an eternal truth, but maybe not - the text does not obviously specify the former, in any case. At the very least, Paul is making an observation about the state of affairs in their cultures, but it's not easy to go beyond that. Even if, then, Paul did in fact mean male headship to be prescriptive rather than merely descriptive, that would not tell us directly whether or not it is prescriptive for us today (rather than being so only for those cultures to which Paul was directly speaking).

Take some of the other passages in the same series: Paul commands children to obey parents and slaves their masters. In the first instance, we think this is still a good arrangement and prescriptive generally across the board. In the second, nowadays, we tend to think that it addresses situations where slavery is socially accepted but is compatible with thinking slavery to be wrong. Similarly, the wife passage may be taken either in the same way as the children passage or in the same way as the slave passage - is female submission to male headship an eternal arrangement or just a way to deal with an unjust situation which is systemic in a particular culture (in this case, patriarchal dominance)?

Ephesians 5 Contains No Command for Wives to Submit - Or, Why Things are Often More Interesting in the Original Greek

With all of my Greek studies, I've gotten to the point where I don't really like translations all that much any more (although it has increased my appreciation of the KJV somewhat, ironically). While I still primarily use the NIV for personal reading, for instance, I would never use it for more in-depth study. It's translations of Romans and Galatians, for instance, are particularly horrid and completely distort the sense of the Greek, reading into it things that either are not there or even completely changing the meaning in an unwarranted fashion. More literal translations tend to be better but not necessarily - the NASB's version of Song of Songs, for instance, misreads crucial sections of the Hebrew so that the Wisdom sub-genre of the Song is nearly lost, resulting in a very inferior version.
In any case, looking at the (in)famous "wives and husbands" passage in Ephesians 5, a favorite at weddings (well, more conservative ones at least), one finds something somewhat different from what winds up in most English translations. Most treat verse 21 as a command for everyone to submit to one another and then move on in 22 to a command for wives to submit to husbands, and then a rule to the effect that this is how things ought to be in verse 24. The thing is, in the Greek none of these commands, "should"s or "ought"s show up in the Greek. Sure, "submit" words show up, but none are in the Imperative mood - which is what is used in Greek to make commands (there are no modal or "ought" words either).
What is found instead is a full complex sentence in verse 18, ending with a command to be filled with the Spirit. What follows in 19-21 are a string of phrases built around a series of participles (think "-ing" words like "singing" or "submitting"). The ESV has a fairly decent literal translation of 19-21:

¹⁹addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, ²⁰ giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, ²¹ submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Verse 21, then, contains a participle, not an imperative. All these phrases are attached to a clause with an imperative, yes ("be filled with the Spirit" in verse 18), but the participles here are probably best seen as describing the results of what is said in that clause rather than, say, what it consists in. 19-21, then, are telling us what happens as a result of the Ephesians being filled with the Spirit. They are not commanded to submit to each other in 21, then, but the submission is portrayed as a natural byproduct of being Spirit-filled.
Now we turn to verse 22, which normally gets stated in English as "Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord". In Greek, however, what it literally says is "Wives to your husbands as to the Lord". It is common in Greek to leave out a word from a sentence or phrase if it has already been used in the previous one and this is what is happening here - this apparently verb-less expression is actually picking up its verbal element from the previous verse. And the verbal element from the previous verse, while a form of the verb for "submit", is not in the imperative form. So it's not a command. Instead, it is a participle - one that was explaining the result of being filled with the Spirit. So this is saying how things are or will be, not how they ought to be let alone commanding them to be that way.
In verse 24 we have something similar - another verse usually translated as a command in English (e.g., "Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands"). But in fact, the Greek has literally "but as the church submits to Christ so also wives to husbands in everything". The second half of that sentence "so also wives to husbands in everything" lacks a verbal element but again picks it up from the previous bit. But the previous verbal element, though again a form of "submit", is not in the Imperative. It is not a command, but a statement of what is in fact happening - the church is submitting to Christ. So again, we have a case of explaining what is going on rather than a command that wives are required to follow.
All in all, then, the Greek syntax seems to bar this passage from being used straightforwardly for any view of women's roles in life. There are, of course, other passages in the Bible that could be used by either side in that debate, but I don't think a very good case could be made for whatever side you take based on this particular one.

Indexicals and Phenomenal Concepts

In this post, I want to connect up the contents of my previous two posts (found here and here). Indexicals connect up to non-indexical representations by showing up in non-indexical places in thought (for instance, 'now' shows up where the temporal parameter should be, 'I' where the personal parameter should be, etc.). Since it takes such a place in thought, it is thus is subject to a minimal amount of conceptualization and is conceptually connected to non-indexical concepts concerning the appropriate parameter it falls under. For instance, 'now' is conceptually connected to temporal concepts since it takes over the role of the temporal parameter at the level of explicit representation. Hence, we are aware of or at least attuned to the general function of 'now' as a representation with a certain kind of usage. And this is at least part of why indexical information "disappears" from the objective, third-person perspective - precisely because such information takes on an explicit role of a certain kind without explicitly assigning any particular value to the parameter it stands in for, and all of this is something of which we can be consciously aware of in the first person. This is why the 1- and 2-intensions of indexicals end up differing and why many of us are not tempted to think that there is any here or I or now in any kind of context-free sense.

With phenomenal concepts, however, we don't have all of this - hence, there is no "dissolution" of phenomenal information from the objective point of view. So even if phenomenal concepts end up being indexical-like in some important way (or recognitional or whatever), this important difference - that it doesn't take the place of a non-indexical parameter - helps make the difference between them and indexical concepts or other perspectival concepts. They simply do not have the conceptual role that normal indexical concepts do, even if their semantics may in some ways be similar.

Linguistic indexicals, for instance, "disappear" since we need to know third person truth conditions to interpret others' usage - and sometimes even our own. And this may sometimes be necessary even in our own thoughts - to know the links between our indexical concepts and the concepts relating to whatever these indexicals are standing in for. But with pure phenomenal concepts, things are a bit different - there is no need for a separate parameter cashed out using non-phenomenal concepts for which phenomenal concepts fill in. And hence there isn't such need to reinterpret what others say in phenomenal terms into non-phenomenal terms. If phenomenal concepts refer to features which can be reduced to the non-phenomenal, since these features would be so complex and outside the ability of most of the human race to get an accurate, specific and non-deferential cognitive fix on in non-phenomenal terms we would ordinarily have no need to have separate explicitly non-phenomenal parameters which phenomenal concepts fill in for - and, indeed, if phenomenal features are anything like brain states of a certain sort then not only would we ordinarily have no need but none of us at the present day (as far as I know) are in a position to even have such parameters. So we do not have such parameters and hence, even if the phenomenal is subsumed under the physical, there will not be much of anything in the way of conceptual connections between phenomenal and physical or functional concepts - even if phenomenal concepts are in some ways like indexicals.

Tensed Thoughts 2.0

Assume all my representations are tenseless representations and I need to use them to act. Are these enough, representation-wise? Since we are talking about creatures which act at a time, for action, we need to coordinate the proposed action with time or else any success we meet in our endeavors will be a wild accident at best. So given tenseless information about a time at which I am located and need to act at, I need to be able to act reliably at that very time. This requires keeping track of the time in some way. To be reliable in coordinating tenseless temporal information with action, then, we need to make certain temporal information relevant in the proper way or action - or intention-in-action-producing at the relevant times. So, in other words, we need at least one clock-like-functioning system which somewhat reliably coordinates action with which times are appropriate to act at and so which tenseless representations are appropriate to act on. This system could take on multiple forms and, indeed, we may need more than one of these. Clock-like systems could include systems that act as timers, oscillators, accumulators, digital clocks, etc.

Now consider a speedometer. A speedometer represents a lot of different speeds. But that by itself is not its function - its function is to indicate (via the pointer) what the speed of the vehicle currently is. So lots of speeds are represented but only one in particular is represented as the speed of the vehicle - and this is done without explicitly representing anything but the speed itself. Now consider a carbon monoxide detector where a light labeled "Carbon Monoxide" lights up whenever the compound is present. Clearly, this detector represents carbon monoxide but its function is to detect the presence of carbon monoxide. So when the light is lit up, it represents carbon monoxide as present - even though its presence is not itself explicitly represented. This works even if the detector tokens a full representation which doesn't mention the presence of carbon monoxide, so long as the function of the system is still the same. So if the light is labeled "Carbon Monoxide is Very, Very Bad", the lighting up of the light and thus the system's coordination of the presence of the compound with the representation is still representing carbon monoxide as present despite this fact being extrinsic to the representation itself.

What we can learn from looking at these few examples is that if it is the function of a system to detect, indicate, or otherwise track that some F is G, and it does this by tokening a representation of F, it thereby represents F as G. Now apply this to clock systems. Clock-like systems can represent a lot of different times or be involved in coordinating times with representations which explicitly refer to a lot of different times. It is the function of the clock-like system to track the current time. And by doing so, it represents that time as being present or being now. So a clock-like system is essentially a tensed system - simply put, just a system for keeping track of the time. That is, we really do need tense after all - not simply tenseless representations.

What a tensed system like a clock in effect does is to attach temporal representations to the appropriate time in such a way as to be in a certain way infallible. This is especially apparent in the case of representations where time is not explicitly represented at all and yet which are still only about temporal matters (and are hence in this sense tensed) - the time enters into the represent implicitly or is represented by itself. An explicit NOW concept is perhaps at least partly a placeholder making explicit the implicit presence of the current time. Tensed systems and representations, then, constitute a kind of direct access to time that we need as agents to act.

If we have a system for keeping track of the time without necessarily requiring an explicit representation of time, it may be more economical for us to token representations which leave reference to the present time implicit. In that sort of case, an ordinary thought about the present time and one simply about how things are simpliciter or tenselessly may very well take the same explicit surface representational form – that is, there may be no syntactically present-tensed verbs at least at the explicit surface level. So we get things like 'Fred is cold' and 'Fred is human' where the first is to be interpreted tensedly whereas the second (arguably) is not (a less contentious example might be one involving a mathematical sentence). Yet both have the same surface explicit surface syntax.

In the tensed representations of this sort that lack a NOW or similar concept or locution, no explicit piece of the representation represents the time (the time of the representation itself does this). The temporal 'at t' parameter which is in the truth conditions is hence not explicitly specified, which is why tenseless and tensed representations of these sorts will look the same. In these present-tensed representations, it is the time of the representation itself (roughly) that enters as the value of the implicit parameter. In other, perhaps less primitive ones, we may have a sentence with an implicit temporal parameter that is not pointed at the present but where the value of the parameter is some time which is particularly salient or otherwise demonstrated. So 'Go to my house' may have the current time as its value - I want you to go now - or it may have some other time contextually specified - such as some time soon, or after you've picked up my laundry, etc.

As mentioned earlier, NOW perhaps, then, acts as something which makes the parameter itself explicit, often indicating the time of the representation but without specifying explicitly which exact time that is - it is a stand-in for that time, whichever it may be. So NOW can be used to explicitly disambiguate representations that can take one or more tensed readings and/or a tenseless one. This might explain part of the reason why NOW always takes wide scope in sentences (particularly modal or temporal ones), since it's really the implicit current value of the temporal parameter that enters into the semantics – the NOW simply indicates its presence or place in those semantics.

All of this perhaps explains part of why tensed views of time are so attractive or natural to many people (put aside whether such views are true or not) - since there is no surface difference between present-tensed and tenseless representations, it is easy to confuse being F at t (where t is the current time) with being F simpliciter. If there is no explicit parameter – just NOW as a placeholder – then it will be easy to confuse ‘being F’ with ‘being F now’. And since NOW is a relatively simple concept, irreducible to tenseless ones, etc., then if one mistakes properties of representations for properties of what is represented (or for properties of what is expressed) one will take it that NOW expresses a relatively simple property which is not reducible to any tenseless ones – that is, there must be irreducibly tensed properties. And not only that, since the reference of NOW shifts over time, given this same confusion we will get confused notions of tensed “temporal passage”. A kind of primitive use/mention confusion.

Additional note: NOW is, perhaps, thus different from PRESENT. PRESENT seems to mean something akin to LOCATED AT or IN THE PRESENCE OF. So 'A is present' "means" 'A is located at' or 'A is in the presence of'. Unlike NOW, PRESENT does not take wide scope. Since this sort of representation is tensed, what is really going on is that the temporal parameter which would complete the representation and tell us at what time A is located is left implicit. So PRESENT takes a temporal parameter like many other predicates and doesn't specify a time at all on its own but will pick up that parameter, like any other similar predicate, from that governing whatever clause in which it happens to be embedded. (Compare the difference in parameter between 'A is present now', 'A is present at noon', etc.)

Replies ad infinitum

Here is a reply to my reply to a reply to my reply to a paper. And my reply to that reply to...wait, where was I?

Discussions About A Recent Post

Philosopher Alan Rhoda has responded on his blog to my earlier post on his (co-authored) pro-open theism paper in Faith and Philosophy. So it's a reply to a reply. And to get the discussion going even further, I've issued my own reply to his reply to my reply to his paper (whew!). Check out the discussion here.

Notes on Ludlow: Ch. 10

**WARNING: Technical Post**

In chapter 10, the antirealism or verficationism shines through strongly. Whereas previously Ludlow noted that we tend to evaluate claims about the past or future based on current evidence, he now seems to say that claims about the past or future are really claims about this evidence (in which case, it's not really evidence except in the trivial sense where we count something as evidence for itself). This, of course, is an unargued leap that he seems to take without being aware of it - if one is to be a presentist, there are a number of ways of grounding past or future truths other than simply in the evidence for such truths. Perhaps Ludlow's linguistic discussion is supposed to provide some such evidence, but it seems to me inconclusive at best, a confusion of assertibility conditions and truth conditions that one would only expect if one were already persuaded of some kind of antirealism.

Indeed, the move seems to be completely unwarranted unless one has already ruled out the alternatives or are assuming some kind of verificationism about meaning. But then it is hard to see how we can rule out many similar, obviously bad moves (notice a pattern developing in this book?). We might, for instance, note that we evaluate claims about other people or places based on personal, spatially proximate evidence. If we follow Ludlow, we would have to conclude that claims about other people or places are just claims about evidence internal to me or where I am at. But this seems to me to be clearly false - solipsism just isn't a viable option. Perhaps someone may object that the evidence we consider can be located in other persons than me or places than the one I am at. It's just mediated by more proximate events, objects or processes. But then we could give exactly the same answer for time - we can be, for instance, in possession of temporally remote evidence about stars via current light processes now reaching the earth from these stars. The same thing goes for fossils, which interestingly, Ludlow thinks are really what sentences purportedly about dinosaurs are really about. But that's just crazy (darn it!).

The main problem Ludlow deals with in this chapter has to do with inferences like the following:

(2)

I am hungry.

--------------------------------------------------

Next Tuesday it will be true that I was hungry.

Now, it might be the case that all evidence for today's hunger disappears by next Tuesday. But then, in that case, it will not be true then that I was hungry today. Ludlow discusses two ways out of this. The first is to say, for instance, that a future tense version of a sentence is true iff the sentence in the present tense is true. So even though there will be no evidence for my hungriness Tuesday, the prediction of future truth is still true. Even though at that later time it ends up not true that I was hungry. This is a pretty weird way out and not very plausible.

The second alternative is to say that the content of my sentences changes over time. So the above inference is going to work even though the evidence for the premise will be long gone because the words purportedly ascribing hungriness to myself change in meaning. But we have no idea what meaning they will take on later, nor for that matter what meaning they had previously. We may, however, not be able to get out of the first strategy here. After all, the proposition that next Tuesday it will be the case that I was hungry seems to follow from the proposition that I am hungry. Since it doesn't make any sense to speak of propositions changing their contents (since, presumably, propositions just are certain sorts of contents), explaining the inference in cases of evidence loss cannot rely on this second strategy. So it looks like Ludlow is going to have to be faced with taking the first alternative after all, which doesn't seem like a good idea.

The main issue behind all of this is whether we can "lose" facts about the past - whether past facts about people or places or events or whatever can simply disappear from reality. And that just seems implausible. The past, whatever else we may say about it, seems firm and fixed and not subject to erasure. Intuitively, this kind of change doesn't seem possible. Despite claims for presentist views that they are common sense, the issues brought up in this chapter I think show that it is indeed quite far from it (or at least Ludlow's version is), Ludlow's protests to the contrary.

Notes on Ludlow: Chs. 7-9

**WARNING: Technical Post**

In Chapter 7, Ludlow begins to construct an alternative, tensed semantics. Parts of this have a strongly antirealist, idealist, or verificationist sort of feel about them. In fact, Ludlow seems to agree with uberantirealist Michael Dummet, stating, 'As Dummet (1969) has argued,a semantic theory that accounts for an agent's semantic knowledge must show how portions of the language are learned from the evidence available to the language learner' (p.99). I'm not sure that this is really correct as it pushes us towards an untenable kind of antirealism about practically everything. And I'm not sure whether Ludlow wants to be committed to such a view. Then again, he seems to flirt with idealism throughout the book, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. To continue the quote,

But now consider how we learn to use past-tense expressions such as (4).
(4)
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
We do not evaluate this sentence by imagining some time earlier than now and determining whether at that time (4) is true. Rather, we evaluate (4) by right now conducting the sort of investigation that is appropriate for past-tense statements like (4). (For example, we might study fossil records.) Likewise for any past-tense statement. We have certain procedures for determining whether a past-tense proposition is true, and these procedures do not involve the evaluation of a proposition at some time past; rather, we simply evaluate the proposition in a particular way - a way which is independent of how we evaluate present-tense and future-tense propositions.
Consider the future-tense proposition (5).
(5)
The economy will recover in the third quarter.
Clearly we do not evaluate such a proposition by picking some time in the third quarter and determining whether it is true at that time that the economy is recovering. Rather, we evaluate it by studying the currently available economic data. Crucially, our evaluation of (5) can proceed without our ever attending to a corresponding present-tense proposition at some future time index.

It's not quite clear to me how any of this is relevant to the debate over tense. After all, the tenseless theorist can simply grant that Ludlow is correct that we look at present evidence to determine the truth of past or future tense statements. The mistake is to infer from this that when we determine the truth or falsity of past or future statements we are not thereby determining whether a certain tenseless fact holds. Using present evidence and not attending de dicto to any present-tense proposition at some future time index is perfectly compatible with this. The only way one could think otherwise would be to assume that tensed r-mirroring truth-conditions must also be m-mirroring truth-conditions. And that, as I've been arguing is clearly a mistake. After all, the same sorts of things Ludlow says about tensed statements could be said about first-person or 'here' sentences as well.

But he continues,

If this picture of the underlying robust theory is correct, then it immediately leads to a second advantage for the A-theory [tensed] proposal under discussion - in fact, a striking epistemological advantage. The B-theorist is in the untenable position of asserting that there is actually reference to past and future times and/or events. However, this flies in the face of everything we know about reference. We are in neither a perceptual relation nor a causal relation with future events, and our causal connection with most past events is tenuous at best. In regard to times, the idea that there could be reference to such abstract objects surely requires major adjustments to current epistemological thinking.

This argument or set of arguments here seems to be a non-starter. I'm not sure how anything Ludlow says makes reference to or quantification over future or past events or times at all problematic. That our causal relation to past things is tenuous seems irrelevant since all that is needed for causal theories of reference is causation - not "super duper not-so-tenuous causation". And if we have a causal theory of reference, then it is reference to present things that is problematic since causation is a cross-temporal relation. That we do not have any causal relation with future things is, I think, not as clear as Ludlow seems to think, but let's give him that for the moment (I tend to think it's false, actually). But quantification or reference do not necessarily require causal relations - one can fix the reference of a name, for instance, by introducing it via an identifying description without having any clear causal contact whatsoever with the object satisfying the description. And quantification over certain entities does not seem to require being causally related to all of them and there's no clear reason why we would need to be. In addition, on most theories of time, times are not abstract but rather concrete objects. In any case, they are treated the same sort of way as places or parts of space. We seem to be able to refer to or quantify over space or regions thereof, so why not times? There seems to be no difference here. All of Ludlow's criticisms here could just as well be thrown against the view that other persons or object outside of myself exist and that we quantify or refer to them. If Ludlow were correct, his views would be pushing us towards a dangerous ontological solipsism where only I exist or an epistemic or semantic solipsism where only I can be referred to or quantified over by myself.

Ludlow ultimately comes to think that his semantics leaves presentism as one of the only plausible, consistent accounts of time. But if we accept presentism for time based on the problems outlined in the book, it seems that similar problems for first-person sentences or 'here' sentences are going to force us into the ontological solipsism mentioned above. After all, if presentism is a main way to get out of McTaggart's Paradox for time, solipsism will be an analogous way to get out similar paradoxes for persons.

Indeed, Ludlow's tensed semantics could be transformed into an analogous first person or 'here' semantics. Ludlow claims in Chapter 8, for instance, that apparent reference to times like 'June 24, 1972' can be paraphrased away as 'when standard calendars read "June 24, 1972"' and that normal tensed sentences will actually be decomposed as complex sentences composed of two tensed sentences joined by 'when', 'after' or 'before'. But we can do the same sorts of things with apparent reference to places and decompose 'here' sentences as complex sentences composed of two 'here' sentences joined by 'where', etc. So 'Paris' becomes something like 'where standard tracking systems read "Paris"'. If we do want reference to times, we can build times up as collections of when-clauses, according to Ludlow. But then if we want reference to places, we can build them up as collections of where-clauses. Perhaps we can do this sort of thing with persons as well - only I exist, but I can refer to other persons as collections of who-clauses (?).

At the end of Chapter 8, Ludlow shows that his theory can apparently get him out of one formulation of McTaggart's Paradox. But it's far from clear that it can escape a reformulation to match Ludlow's theory. Heather Dyke's formulation, suitably adjusted to face Ludlow, seems, for instance, like it would cause Ludlow particular trouble.

Chapter 9 consists in listing some psychological considerations that may or may not help the tensed theorist. I think they do not - the tenseless theorist should be at ease with all the data discussed. In fact, that's just the sort of data one would expect if the New Tenseless Theory were true - people think tensedly. In fact, some have argued that the data actually favors the tenseless theory. In addition, not all of the discussion is clear or very clearly well-motivated. Some of the discussion of and quotes from Merleau-Ponty, for instance, is metaphorical and opaque at best and of unclear relevance to the topic or the use Ludlow seems to want to put it to. So I think chapter 9 is inconclusive at best.

The last-ish notes are soon to com.

Notes on Ludlow: Chs. 5-6

**WARNING: Technical Post**

In the beginning of Chapter 5 Ludlow says,

A first attempt at a semantical theory consistent with this [the tenseless] picture would be to give "tenseless truth conditions" for tensed sentences. That is, we want the right-hand sides to be free of A-series predicates (including 'past' and 'future' as well as temporal indexicals. (p.77)

Such a theory, as Ludlow sketches in the remainder of the chapter, would involve use of temporal language committing us to the existence of other times standing in various temporal relations (or, if we wanted to adopt more of a reductionist or relationalist picture, the existence of events standing in various temporal relations).

In the next chapter, Chapter 6, Ludlow details what he takes to be problems for the tenseless theory. The main problem is something I already addressed in my post on Chapter 3 - Ludlow thinks that the tenseless theory cannot deal with 'the indexical nature of temporal discourse'. This is just the problem with the man in the house of mirrors again. To give just one example, Ludlow claims that the following two sentences as said on March 12 express different semantical knowledge and that the tenseless theory cannot deal with this because it will have to give them the same truth conditions (in the rest of the chapter, Ludlow also, despite earlier toying with the theory, rejects token-reflexive theories for temporal language (rightly, I believe)):

(1) My fifth anniversary is (this) March 12.

(2) My fifth anniversary is today.

He also notes, with Prior, that it seems that one is not thanking goodness for any tenseless fact when one is thankful that a painful dentist visit is over with but the tenseless theory seems to require that this is what one is thankful for.

The answer here is a fairly easy one - distinguish between, on the one hand, Ludlow's "semantical" truth-conditions which are intended to mirror the speaker's perspective and way of representing things (we can call these r-mirroring truth conditions, since they are supposed to mirror our way of representing the world), and, on the other, "metaphysical" truth-conditions which are supposed to capture the metaphysical structure of the world as it matches up (or fails to do so) to our representations (we can call these m-mirroring truth conditions, since they are supposed to mirror the metaphysical structure or "joints" of reality). "'e is now' is true iff e is now" can be a correct account of the truth conditions as represented by the knower (that is, the r-mirroring truth conditions) but it can still be true that what makes 'e is now' true is the tenseless fact that e is at t (these are its m-mirroring truth-conditions). That is, it can still be true that a mental or public tokening of 'e is now' at t is true iff e is at t since at t 'e is now' and 'e is at t' express the exact same fact, just with a different representational form - the former is needed for action whereas the latter is not sufficient so that when one represents the truth conditions one needs, for action, to represent them in the latter way - in an r-mirroring rather than m-mirroring way. If they are represented as ' 'e is now' is true iff e is the time of this utterance', for instance, that will not be sufficient for action or sufficient to know that e is now since i don't know this utterance is now.

So ultimately I don't think the failure Ludlow notices in providing tenseless r-mirroring truth conditions is really relevant to whether or not we should be tenseless theorists. A tenseless theorist just isn't committed to giving r-mirroring truth conditions. Indeed, this can be seen as the characteristic difference between the Old Tenseless Theory of Russell and company and the New Tenseless Theory of Mellor and others - the Old theorists were trying to give r-mirroring truth conditions and that was shown, as Ludlow has shown once again, to be a failure. The New theorists, on the other hand, have abandoned that project as hopeless and wish instead to give us tenseless m-mirroring truth conditions while allowing that we cannot give tenseless r-mirroring truth conditions for all tensed language. I think this is where Ludlow fundamentally misunderstands what Mellor is trying to do.

This is similar to what's going on in phil mind over property dualism (the view that there are irreducibly mental properties). The phenomenal concept strategy tries to show that physical descriptions do not miss anything in the world that can be captured by phenomenal descriptions but that this is compatible with the conceptual irreducibility of the phenomenal to the physical - that is, phenomenal descriptions must be given phenomenal r-mirroring truth conditions but that's compatible with giving them physical m-mirroring truth conditions.

On the last page of the chapter, Ludlow is somewhat cryptic about why tensed truth conditions or tensed beliefs require a tensed reality:

If the world contains only B-theory resources, then precisely how do we avoid having a B-theory psychology?

The illusion of a possible way out here is fostered by thinking that there could be psychological concepts that are, as it were, disembodied - cut off from the actual world in important ways. How can a psychological property (call it foo) that bears no relation to tense in the actual world have anything to do with tense?

It is no good to say that our abstract property foo is tensed because it is grounded in our time consciousness or temporal perception. That merely keeps the question one step removed. Then we must ask what it is about time consciousness or perception that makes them tensed. Why do we call consciousness or perception tensed if it does not correspond to something tensed in the actual world?

[...]psychological states (particularly perceptual states) are individuated in part by relations to the external world. In this case, that means that if the world is not tensed then it is difficult to see how our perception of the world could be tensed. (p.96)

I'm not quite sure what the problem is here - the tenseless theorist has perfectly reasonable accounts of how our tensed psychological states hook up to the tenseless world. It is necessary for our representations in general to fed into our cognitive systems in certain forms for them to be useful to us - in order for the ordinary descriptive facts of the world to be useful for action they need to represented by us in certain special ways. Facts about time are like this too and we call our special-functioning representations tensed when they have this function with relation to time. Tense has to do with the structure of our representations, not the facts they are about. Just because our representations have particular features doesn't mean the facts they represent have to have those features. So much should be pretty darn obvious. So this plea at the end of the chapter just seems to me to be pretty lame.

Four chapter to go...

Notes on Ludlow: Ch. 3

**WARNING: Technical Post **

In chapter 3, Ludlow supports the idea that the character or role of indexicals ought to find their way into the semantics for such terms. For an example, consider this quote of his (p59):

In a house of mirrors, someone might point at a man who is about to be attacked by a dog, saying 'He is being attacked by a dog', and I may assent to this judgement, not realizing that I am about to be attacked. Intuitively, someone who says 'You are about to be attacked by a dog' is saying something more than the first speaker. To say that this extra information lies outside the province of semantics seems to be surrendering all too quickly.

But "saying something more" in what sense? Is that "something more" really something semantic and if so what is that "something more"? Perhaps it is just something more in the sense that it is of a different form and admits of a different cognitive, practical, or functional role. But that need not mean that this something more must show up in the truth conditions of a sentence unless we are liberal in what we ascribe to the sense of a sentence. If we don't do this, then it is not clear, without further information, whether Ludlow really disagrees with his opponents here since they are just forming truth conditions for differing purposes. After all, it's not clear to me that the "something more" is really "extra information" at all rather than old information in a different, more useful (or differently useful) form. Even if there is extra information carried by the different sentences, why think that this is semantically rather than pragmatically conveyed. Why think that just because a sentence carries information that this must fall into its semantics? Every spoken sentence, for instance, carries the information that it is spoken at a specific time by a specific person who is in certain brain states, etc. But clearly if we allow all the information carried by an utterance into the semantics, that would not be a good idea - the whole notion of semantics would be stretched to the breaking point.

Let's say that the extra information for a word like "you" is that it refers to the person being addressed, so that "you are the person I'm addressing with this utterance" is true iff the person I'm addressing with this utterance is the person I'm addressing with this utterance. But if we want to such truth-conditions to capture as much as possible, as Ludlow seems to want, then is clearly not acceptable - the sentence on the right hand side clearly does not have the same sense (in the widest sense) as the sentence mentioned on the left. For one thing, they have differing cognitive significance. I can, for instance, know that the former is true without having any clear idea whether the latter is true. And the former is contingently true whereas the latter is necessarily, and trivially, true.

Ludlow's proposed fix here is not persuasive in the least. He proposes that a sentence like (25) "It could have been the case that you are not the person I'm addressing with this utterance" is to be analyzed (? - it's not clear whether he's saying it's synonymous or that this really what the sentence is like at the level of logical form or what) as (26) "It could have been that the person I'm addressing with this utterance is not the person I'm addressing with this utterance". That sentence seems ambiguous between de re and de dicto readings and Ludlow seems to think that we should treat the original sentence as the de re version of its analysis. But it's not clear why it should be the de re reading rather than the de dicto. Or why we should take the alleged fact that 26 gives us the truth conditions for 25 as reason to think that 25 has a similar structure.

Consider the following exchange between Paul Teller and me on this sort of account for the word "now", where "e is now" is true iff e is the time of this utterance:

Paul: If there is a model then there are questions about scope Consider (1) "E might have occurred now" We could read this as
(a) Possibly [te is the time at which e occurs, tu is the time at which the utterance occurs, and te = tu]
I don't think this reading can be given to (1), but we'll have to consult with the experts whether this is just bad ear on my part. It seems to me that the natural reading is
(b) tu is the time at which the utterance occurse, (viz, in the real world) and possibly [te is the time at which e occurs and te = tu that is there is some possible world in which e occurs at the time in which the utterance occurs in the real world.

Me: The trouble here is that in (1) we have a possibility operator applied to a single sentence - "e occurs now" - which does not apparently have the internal structure specified in the above truth conditions. I'm not quite sure how the logical form of a sentence using "occurs" would get written out (since sentences about events are tricky like that), so let's use a simpler example:
(2) e is now
Again, applying a possibility operator to (2) does not seem to produce a sentence that has the internal structure of the truth conditions provided by either of the examples above. This is because (2) seems, grammatically, to be an atomic sentence and hence lacks the structure to support the scope ambiguity you mention above. (2), in logical notation, seems to come out as
(3) Ne
and applying a possibility operator to this we get
(4) Pos (Ne)
There seems to be only one scope possible for the possibility operator here - that is, to operate over the entire sentence, which means that to evaluate the truth of (4) we must look in every possible world and see if there is one where (3) is true. To find a possible world where (3) is true is just to find one where the truth conditions for (3) are met. And since the token reflexive theory requires that the truth conditions for (3) require a token of the sentence to exist, (4) requires there to be some possible world where a token exists - so something like (a) would be the correct truth conditions, not (b). That the statement of the truth conditions for any of these sentences is complex and can have varying scope for possibility operators is besides the point since the fact that the statement of a sentence's truth conditions has a certain structure does not entail anything about the structure of the sentence itself. Consider the following statement of truth conditions for "Jerry is a bachelor":
(5) "Jerry is a bachelor" is true iff Jerry is unmarried, marriagable, and male. Now consider the following sentence:
(6) Jerry is necessarily a bachelor.
If we treat (6) in the same way (4) is treated by (b) above then we can get the following incorrect truth conditions for (6):
(7) (6) is true iff Jerry is unmarried and necessarily (Jerry is marriagable and male)
But clearly (7) is not correct - where a modal operator applies to an atomic sentence, there is no way to move the operator further inside the sentence - the operator clearly applies to the entire sentence. EVEN IF the statement of the truth conditions for the atomic sentence is not itself atomic.

So one of Ludlow's proposals, to give a kind of token-reflexivy analysis of the truth-conditions for indexical sentences, is not going to be very promising unless all we are after is extensional equivalence (which Ludlow is clearly not - he wants to load up sense as much as possible and stick it all in the truth-conditions or have it "displayed" there if he can). Of course, if all we are after is extensional equivalence, anyone - opponents included - could be happy with these sorts of truth conditions.

Ludlow's other proposal is to take it that (28a) 'I walk' is true iff I walk. The trouble is applying this sort of T-schema to other people's utterances of the same thing. One way to take care of this is to say that the truth conditions we use are different when others are speaking. But that seems rather ad hoc, especially if the truth conditions are supposed to display the sense of such a sentence. But since I use 28a for 'I walk' it should not matter whether I say it or not since the sense seems to be the same no matter who uses it. But then that's not very plausible since when someone else says 'I walk' they are not saying that I walk. Clearly, then, if we are to use differing truth conditions in our evaluations of sentences when they come from us or from someone else, that must mean that we display different aspects of the sentence in each case. And if that's so then it seems that we can't be too liberal about what must be included in the sense of a sentence if both truth conditions for myself and those for others are both supposed to display senses. It can't be required to capture the full cognitive significance of such a sentence, which calls into question Ludlow's program a bit.

Perhaps, though, the truth conditions are supposed to represent just the facts a person knows and just the way they know them. So maybe it is true that I use things like 28a in interpreting what I am saying since I must represent the truth conditions in such a way in order to use them. But that doesn't mean (to anticipate my objections to later chapters) that in representing things in the way 28a does that I am representing some fact over and above the fact that (28b) 'I walk' is true iff Ian Spencer walks - even though I have to represent it like 28a rather than like 28b.


More later.

Notes on Ludlow: Chs. 1-2

**WARNING: Technical Post**

A lot of my dissertation is going to be about the debate between the tensed and tenseless views of time. Roughly, the main idea behind the tensed view is that reality itself is fundamentally tensed - there is an absolute, single present and absolute past and future and any description of reality must fundamentally be tensed as well. The tenseless view, on the other hand, sees talk of past, present and future as reducible to talk about various times merely being earlier or later or simultaneous and views tense as merely linguistic - reality itself is not in any way fundamentally tensed. So perhaps when I say 'We are eating now' at 6pm what makes that true or false is whether we are eating at 6pm - there's no need to talk about anything being present or past or whatever.

So for research I've been reading Peter Ludlow's Semantics, Tense, and Time and I must say that so far I am fairly unimpressed. He seems to just be regurgitating old tensed theorist arguments against tenseless theory. For one thing, many of his characterizations of the tenseless theory (which he calls the 'B-theory'), are controversial or misleading at best. No reasonable tenseless theorist, for instance, would characterize their own view as saying "time is simply a sequence of unchanging and tenseless events" (p1) - tenseless, yes; unchanging, no. Nor would they agree that the opposite view is characterized by thinking that "it is fundamental to the notion of time that events [...] have genuine temporal status" (pp2-3) as if the tenseless theory somehow denied this. I don't remember where he says this, but he also characterizes the distinction between the two theories by saying that, unlike the tensed theory, the tenseless theory denies the reality of "genuine change" - a characterization that no tenseless theorist would accept.

Chapter 1 seemed to be rather confused (and this confusion seems to follow through the rest of the book) in that, while Ludlow maintains that the only real language is our innate biological internal I-language (and that public, E-language does not exist), he persistently - in this chapter and in others - seems to treat I-language as if it were English. But that seems implausible since I-language is supposed to be part of our biological endowment whereas the grammar of English and connections between the world and English words definitely is not. We certainly use English words to express our internal representations of the world but I'm not sure that it follows that my I-language is simply English. Ludlow says he thinks he is following Chomsky here but I don't know enough personally about what he says to tell whether that's true. If I-language is just English, then I would have to disagree with Ludlow about it being our Language of Thought. After all, I think we learn English by using mental representations in the first place and this would be impossible if all representation had to be in English to start with. And if I-language is English after all it's not so clear that all our representations are really linguistic in character rather than also geometric or map-like or imagistic or whatever. After all, if animals don't have I-language then, given the similarities in our brains, it seems likely that, in addition to the linguistic representational capacities our brains have, we would also have more primitive forms of representation in common with more primitively brained organisms.

In chapter 2 Ludlow champions a view of semantics on which the job of semantic theory is to tell us what people know when they know the meanings of sentences. This in itself, I think, tells against the idea that my internal representational system is fundamentally English. After all, assuming Ludlow is correct, I learn English by learning the semantic rules for English which I then represent in my mind. But my representation of the rules, if in English, are themselves in need of interpretation and require that I know and represent some further rules in order to know what they mean. But (since global holism is false) this can't keep going on. So if I must know rules for every representation in English I must have some rules I know that aren't in English. But then we must ask about the semantics of these representations. The bottom line is that I must ultimately have some representations that do not require my knowledge of their semantic rules in order to use them competently. Otherwise, my semantic rules would either be circular or I'd be off on an infinite regress. So while showing what rules people know when they know the meaning of a sentence is useful for semantics, it cannot be the entire semantic story (if it is part of it all, which can be disputed - see some of Scott Soames' work for lots and lots of criticism of this view of semantic theory).

Ludlow thinks that semantic theory should take the form of a system of axioms (maybe with axioms like ' "Ted" refers to Ted', etc.) which can in turn be used to derive a system of sentences which give us the truth-conditions (so, for instance, one such sentence would be '"Snow is white" is true iff snow is white') for all the sentences of the language in question. He then supports the view that the truth-conditions derived in such a theory for various expressions will be such that each of them ' "shows" or "displays" the sense of the expressions' (p42). By this, he seems to say a few pages later, he means that the right hand side of the biconditional (the "iff" statement) will have the sense of the expression referred to on the left hand side. What this amounts to will depend on what the notion of sense amounts to. Sense might include functional, cognitive, or practical role, determination of reference or truth, the form taken, etc. The more sense encompasses, however, the more unclear it is that this sort of semantic theory has all the metaphysical ramifications that Ludlow is going to want out of it. The less it includes, on the other hand, the more unclear it is that it includes everything we would want our semantics to include. But he can't have it both ways, it seems.

More tomorrow.