Attitudes and Contents

Abstract

G. F. Schueler's paper puts in a forceful way various reservations about my treatment of indirect contexts, on behalf of position I have called quasi-realism.1 His opposition is, I think, as complete as could be: it not only that my treatment has been incomplete, which I happily concede, or that its formulation has been defective, which I am prepared to believe, but also that nothing like it could possibly succeed. That at least proper consequence of some of his views-on logical form, and on validity, and on nature of commitment. For example, if to show that an inference has the logical or is an instance of modus ponens involves taking it as the realist picture has it, then no attempt to explain it in other terms will be compatible with its having that form. Again, if validity (as it used in logic) defined in terms of impossibility of premises being true and conclusions false, then persons reluctant to apply truth and falsity to any of elements of an inference will have to admit that inference not valid, as term used in logic. Third, if talk of 'commitments' problematic for antirealist then antirealism will make no headway by thinking of a more general class of commitments than those with representative or realistic truth conditions. Fortunately, none of these contentions seems to me correct. Since survival of quasi-realism even in spirit demands their rebuttal, I shall start by considering them in turn. 1. It not too clear what it for an argument to have logical form of modus ponens. If that a remark about syntactical form, then obviously having that logical form compatible with any number of deep and different semantics for components. To show this compare P->Q, so with implication taken as truth-functional, with same seeming argument taken as some suppose English take it: P->Q commitment of one who attributes a high probability to Q conditional upon P. Which true modus ponens? If we plump for either exclusively, we face uncomfortable consequence that it becomes