Approaches to Hyperintensionality

University of Geneva, 12-13 September 2024

Venue: Phil 102 (Bd des Philosophes 22)

Speakers 

Francesco Berto (University of St Andrews & University of Amsterdam)

Peter Fritz (University College London & University of Oslo) 

Nicholas Jones (University of Oxford) 

Stephan Krämer (University of Hamburg)

Daniel Nolan (University of Notre Dame) 

Aybüke Özgün (University of Amsterdam) 

Niccolò Rossi (University of Barcelona) 

Provisional schedule

Abstracts

Daniel Nolan: Natural languages have hyperintensional semantics. That is, expressions which display necessary equivalence need to be assigned distinct semantic values. One salient example of this is where a sentence or clause expresses a complete proposition that is necessary or impossible; we cannot treat all impossibilities the same, or all necessary truths as interchangeable. Once we use more fine grained semantic values, however, we face a well known challenge: how fine grained are the semantic values do we need? Can we stop before assigning each distinct sentence type a different semantic value, for example?

Once we look at the full range of constructions available in English, it becomes hard to keep semantic values coarse. Some semantic frameworks, including impossible worlds frameworks, give us all the flexibility we need. A natural concern is that we purchase this flexibility just by reproducing the phenomena rather than explaining them. This paper explores a pluralist approach where we adopt different models, of the same overall kind, for modelling different semantic phenomena. While this approach does have challenges and drawbacks, it may be the best response to the variety of semantic phenomena we face.

Nicholas Jones: I will explore one way of simulating some aspects of hyperintensional metaphysics within an intensional setting, via opacity in the vocabulary used to express metaphysical fundamentality.

Peter Fritz: I consider the prospects of hyperintensionality in the setting of Classicism. Classicism is a view about the individuation of propositions, properties, and relations (PPRs) formulated in terms of higher-order logic. According to Classicism, there is a broadest notion of necessity, and PPRs are identical just in case they are necessarily coextensive according to this broadest necessity. To accommodate hyperintensionality in this setting, I consider the prospects of the claim that metaphysical necessity is not broadest. One way of motivating this view assumes that metaphysical necessity amounts to truth in all possible worlds, while some but not all broadly possible propositions are true in some possible world.

Niccolò Rossi: In recent years the study of topic or subject matter has found application in the analysis of epistemic propositional attitudes such as knowledge and belief. To know or believe a proposition, one needs to grasp its topic, i.e. what the proposition is about. This yields a hyperintensional treatment of epistemic attitudes: if two necessary equivalent propositions differ in subject matter, they cannot be substituted salva veritate in the context of those attitudes. In this paper, I aim to extend this approach to propositional justification. I argue that, in contrast to epistemic propositional attitudes, having propositional justification for a proposition does not require grasping the totality of its topic, but only part of it. This is the case because one may possess evidence for a proposition even without grasping the totality of its topic. I define what it means to be evidence for a proposition, borrowing some notions from the logical grounding literature. Building on extant frameworks modelling evidential support and subject matter, I then put forward a modal clause for propositional justification which turns out to be closed under Strong Kleene Logic.

Stephan Krämer: Grounding is widely considered to be a hyperintensional relation: some necessarily co-obtaining facts differ with respect to what grounds them and/or what they ground. To the extent that they take grounding to be a worldly relation, friends of grounding are thus committed to a view of reality as hyperintensional. Timothy Williamson (‘Degrees of Freedom: Is Good Philosophy Bad Science?’) has recently criticized extant defences of this view as being overly ‘driven by examples, especially by apparent counterexamples to intensional principles’ (87), without taking seriously the possibility that intuitions about these examples might be errors generated by useful but fallible general heuristics. In response, a hyperintensionalist might either try to defend the accuracy of the relevant intuitions, or they might look for other ways to defend their view, based on general, systematic considerations rather than intuitions about examples. My talk begins to explore the second option, by suggesting that any attempt to develop a theory of grounding in a way that prioritizes theoretical virtues will lead to a hyperintensional view of reality. In a nutshell, when we try to systematize the class of plausible cases of grounding, we find that grounding connections come about in at least two distinct ways, which we may describe as grounding by decomposition and grounding by specification, respectively. The relevant notions of decomposition and specification in turn appear to stand in systematic relationships to the logical operations of conjunction and disjunction, respectively. Any reasonably strong and general account of the connections between conjunction, disjunction, and grounding resulting from these relationships, I argue, would seem to require a view of grounding as hyperintensional.

Aybüke Özgün: Intentional modals have recently received topic-sensitive treatment. One application involves the logic of imagination.  According to a prominent treatment by Berto (2018, 2022), the topic of the imaginative output must be contained within the topic of the imaginative input. That is, imaginative episodes can never expand what they are about. We argue that this constraint is implausible from a psychological point of view, and it wrongly predicts the falsehood of true reports of imagination. Thus the constraint should be relaxed; but how? In this work, we explore a number of direct approaches to relaxing the controversial content-inclusion constraint. The core idea is to consider adding an expansion operator to the mereology of topics. The logic that results depends on the formal constraints placed on topic expansion, the choice of which are subject to philosophical dispute. The first semantics we explore is a topological approach using a closure operator. The second approach uses an inclusive and monotone increasing operator, and we give a sound and complete axiomatisation for its logic. The third approach uses an inclusive and additive operator, and we show that the associated logic is strictly weaker than the previous two systems. This is joint work with Aaron J. Cotnoir.

Time permitting, I will also elaborate on further generalizations of the topic-sensitive semantics of imagination and the applications of proposed topic expansion operators to knowledge, belief, and conditionals. The main part of this talk is based on joint work with Aaron J. Cotnoir (University of St Andrews). 

Francesco Berto (joint work with Levin Hornischer, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy): Sentences φ and ψ are cognitive synonyms for one when they play the same role in one’s cognitive life: what one understands when either is uttered, one does, when the other is; whatever one concludes supposing either, one does, supposing the other; whatever belief change would be triggered by learning either, would also be triggered by learning the other; etc. The notion is important for linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, but difficult to pin down. It’s bound to be  hyperintensional, but it seems subject to conflicting desiderata. It features in ‘dead parrot’ series (yep, Monty Python involved): sequences of sentences φ1,…,φn where adjacent φi and φi+1 are cognitive synonyms while φ1 and φn are not, which threaten its compositionality. We employ our framework of two-component (2C) semantics to model the notion, thus showing that it’s coherent.

Organizers
Alessandro Cecconi, Fabrice Correia and Lisa Vogt (email: firstname.lastname [at] unige.ch).

Registration

The event is free, but we would be grateful if you register by sending Lisa Vogt an email. Unfortunately, online attendance is not possible. 

Support

We are grateful for support by the Swiss National Science Foundation for support within the context of the project "Describing the World".