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Nathan Salmon

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Nathan Salmon
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern Philosophy
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
Main interests
Philosophy of language; metaphysics; philosophy of logic
Notable ideas
analysis of belief; existence as predicate; inter-substitutability of co-designative names; invalidity of S4; reality of mythical objects; the pragmatic fallacy; universal determinacy of identity
File:Nathan Salmon.jpg

Nathan U. Salmon (né Nathan Salmon Ucuzoglu, 1951-) is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of logic.

Biography

Salmon was born January 2, 1951 in Los Angeles to Sephardi Jews of Spanish-Turkish heritage. He is grandson of archivist Emily Sene (née Emily Perez) and oud player Isaac Sene. A self-taught, semi-professional guitarist, Salmon learned much of what he knows of music theory while in middle school from his boyhood friend, music prodigy James Newton Howard. During his youth Salmon tried unsuccessfully to believe in the Judeo-Christian God. Finding Russell's teapot spiritually unfulfilling as an alternative to theism, Salmon eventually converted to the Church of FSM.

Salmon attended El Camino College and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA Salmon studied with leading philosophers/logicians Tyler Burge, Alonzo Church, Keith Donnellan, Donald Kalish, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, and Yiannis Moschovakis. Salmon earned his Ph.D. in 1979 while he was assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. Salmon's first book, Reference and Essence (his UCLA doctoral dissertation) won the 1984 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools in the United States. Salmon is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1984.

Work

Summary

In philosophy of language Salmon defends the theory of direct reference. He has provided direct-reference accounts both of propositional attitudes and of Frege's puzzle about true identifications, i.e., truths of the form "a = b" (in his books, Frege's Puzzle and Content, Cognition, and Communication). Salmon maintains, controversially, that co-designative proper names are inter-substitutable with preservation of semantic content. Thus, on Salmon's view the sentence "Samuel Clemens was witty" expresses exactly the same content as "Mark Twain was witty", whether or not the competent user of these sentences realizes it, and that therefore one who believes that Mark Twain was witty ipso facto also believes that Samuel Clemens was. Salmon argues that this is made palatable by recognizing that to believe a proposition is to be cognitively disposed in a particular manner toward that proposition when taking it by means of some proposition-guise or other, and that one may be so disposed relative to one proposition-guise while not being so disposed relative to another. Salmon applies this apparatus to solve a variety of famous philosophical puzzles, including Frege's puzzle, Kripke's puzzle about so-called de dicto belief, and W. V. O. Quine's puzzle about de re belief. For example, Quine describes a scenario in which Ralph believes that Ortcutt is no spy, yet Ralph also believes that the man in the brown hat is a spy, when unbeknownst to Ralph the man in the hat is none other than Ortcutt. Under these circumstances, is Ortcutt believed by Ralph to be a spy? On Salmon's account he is, since Ralph is appropriately cognitively disposed toward the proposition about Ortcutt that he is a spy when taking that proposition by means of one proposition-guise, even thought Ralph is not so disposed relative to an alternative, equally relevant proposition-guise.

In addition Salmon has provided direct-reference accounts of problems of nonexistence and of names from fiction. In particular Salmon is known for his solution, compatible with direct reference, to the traditional problem of true, negative existentials, i.e., truths of the form "a does not exist" (Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning). Salmon argues, directly contrary to Immanuel Kant, that existence is a property, one that particular individuals have and other individuals lack. According to Salmon, the English verb "exist" is (among other things) a term for this alleged property, and a sentence of the form "a exists" is true if and only if the subject term designates something with the property of existence, and is false (and "a does not exist" is true) if and only if the subject term designates something with the complementary property of nonexistence. Thus Russell's example, "The present king of France exists", is neither true nor false, since France is not presently a monarchy, and therefore "the present king of France" does not designate; whereas "Napoleon exists" is simply false, since although Napoleon once existed, the moment he died he took on the property of nonexistence.

By contrast, Salmon maintains that "Sherlock Holmes exists" is literally true, whereas "Sherlock Holmes was a detective" is literally false. According to Salmon, Sherlock Holmes is an abstract entity created by author Arthur Conan Doyle, and the fiction is a story, or a collection of stories, which are about that very character but are literally false. Holmes really exists, but is only depicted as a detective in the fiction. In the fiction, Holmes is a detective; in reality, Holmes is merely a fictional detective.

Salmon extends this view to mythical objects, like the hypothetical planet, Vulcan. Vulcan really exists, but it is not a real planet. It is an abstract entity that is only depicted as a planet in the myth. Salmon's account of fiction and myth thus has direct application to the philosophy of religion. Salmon has also applied his account of mythical objects to Peter Geach's famous problem of uncovering the logical form of the particular sentence, "Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she (the same witch) killed Cob's sow". Salmon's account shows how the problematic sentence can be true even though there are no witches, and even if Hob and Nob do not know about each other, and there is no one whom they think is a witch.

Salmon maintains, again contrary to Kant, that it is completely legitimate to invoke existence in a term's definition. Thus "God" might be legitimately defined as the conceivable individual that is divine and also exists. According to Salmon, the ontological argument for God's existence fallaciously assumes that "The F is F" is truth of logic, or an analytic truth. What is true by logic is a significantly weaker variant: "If anything is uniquely F, then the F is F". The strongest conclusion that validly follows from the proposed definition is that if any conceivable individual actually is uniquely both divine and existent, then God actually exists. This same conclusion is also a trivial logical consequence of the atheist's contention that no conceivable individual actually is uniquely both divine and existent. According to Salmon's critique, the ontological argument thus shows nothing.

Salmon argues that natural-language sentences that are representable as λ-converts of one another (in the sense of Church's lambda-calculus) are, although logically equivalent by λ-conversion, typically not strictly synonymous, i.e., they typically differ in semantic content--as for example "a is large and also a is seaworthy" and "a is a thing that is both large and seaworthy".

Salmon maintains a sharp division between semantics and pragmatics (speech acts). He argues that in uttering a sentence, a speaker typically asserts a good deal more than the words' semantic content, and that, consequently, it is a mistake to identify the semantic content of a sentence with what is said by its speaker. Salmon maintains that such an identification is an instance of a mistaken form of argument in the philosophy of language, "the pragmatic fallacy."

Salmon is also known in metaphysics for, among other things, his analysis of arguments for essentialism--the doctrine that some properties of things are properties that those things could not fail to have (except perhaps by not existing). In particular, Salmon is known for his development and defense of a reductio ad absurdum argument, using a sorites-like problem (slippery slope), against nearly universally accepted modal logic systems S4 and S5, which he argues commit "the fallacy of necessity iteration" (Reference and Essence and Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning). He also provided a controversial reductio ad absurdum "disproof" of indeterminate identity, i.e., the philosophically popular idea that for some pairs of things there is no fact of the matter concerning whether those things are one and the very same. (Reference and Essence and Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning). Salmon argues that if there were a pair of things, x and y, whose identity was indeterminate, then this pair would have to be different from the reflexive pair of x with itself (since there is a fact concerning whether x and x are the same). It would then follow by set theory that x and y are not the same, in which case there would be a fact of the matter after all concerning whether x and y are the same: they are not. Therefore, there cannot be a pair of things for which there is no fact concerning their identity. On the other hand, Salmon maintains that not all vagueness is due to language and some indeterminacy results from how things themselves are, i.e., that for some things and some attributes, independently of language, there is no fact of the matter concerning whether those things have those attributes. Critics of Salmon's alleged proof respond that the putative difference between <x, y> and <x, x>--that there is a fact whether the elements of the latter, but not of the former, are the same thing--is not the sort of difference from which it is legitimate to infer that those pairs are not the same.

Salmon's primary influences are philosophers/logicians Alonzo Church, Gottlob Frege, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, and Bertrand Russell.

Publications

Books

Selected Articles

  • "Analyticity and Apriority" (1993) in Philosophical Perspectives, 7: Language and Logic, James Tomberlin, (ed). Ridgeview, Atascadero.
  • "Assertion and Incomplete Definite Descriptions" (1982) Philosophical Studies 42: 37-46.
  • "Being of Two Minds: Belief with Doubt" (1995) Noûs 29 (1): 1-20.
  • "Demonstrating and Necessity" (2002) Philosophical Review 111 (4): 497-537
  • "Existence" (1987) in Philosophical Perspectives, James Tomberlin (ed). Ridgeview, Atascadero.
  • "The Fact That x = y" (1987) Philosophia 17: 517-518.
  • "How Not to Become a Millian Heir" (1991) Philosophical Studies 165-177.
  • "How Not to Derive Essentialism From the Theory of Reference" (1979) Journal of Philosophy 76: 703-725.
  • "How to Become a Millian Heir" (1989) Noûs 23: 211-220.
  • "How to Measure the Standard Metre" (1988) Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 88: 193-217.
  • "Identity Facts" (2002) Philosophical Topics 30: 237-267.
  • "Illogical Belief" (1989) in Philosophical Perspectives, 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory. Ridgeview, Atascadero.
  • "Impossible Worlds" (1984) in Analysis 44: 114-117.
  • "The Limits of Human Mathematics" (2001) Noûs 15: 93-117.
  • "The Logic of What Might Have Been" (1989) Philosophical Review 98: 3-34.
  • "Modal Paradox: Parts and Counterparts, Points and Counterpoints" (1986) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 11: 75-120.
  • "Mythical Objects" (2002) in Campbell, O'Rourke, and Shier, Meaning and Truth.
  • "Naming, Necessity, and Beyond" (2003) Mind 112 (447): 475-492.
  • "Nonexistence" (1998) Noûs 32 (3): 277-319.
  • "On Content" (1992) Mind 101 (404): 733-751.
  • "On Designating" (2005) Mind 114 (456): 1069-1133.
  • "The Pragmatic Fallacy" (1991) Philosophical Studies 83-97.
  • "A Problem in the Frege-Church Theory of Sense and Denotation" (1993) Noûs 27(2): 158-166.
  • "Reference and Information Content: Names and Descriptions" (1989) in Handbook of Philosophical Logic, D. Gabbay (ed). Kluwer, Dordrecht.
  • "Reflections on Reflexivity" (1992) Linguistics and Philosophy 15(1): 53-63.
  • "Reflexivity" (1986) Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 27: 401-429.
  • "Relational Belief" (1995) in On Quine: New Essays, Paolo Leonardi (ed). Cabridge University Press, New York.
  • "Relative and Absolute Apriority" (1993) Philosophical Studies 69(1): 83-100.
  • "Review of Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity by Scott Soames" (2003) Mind 112(447): 475-492.
  • "Tense and Intension" (2003) in Time, Tense, and Reference, Aleksander Jokic and Quentin Smith (eds). MIT Press, Cambridge.
  • "Tense and Singular Propositions" (1989) in Themes From Kaplan. Oxford University Press, New York.
  • "A Theory of Bondage" (2006) The Philosophical Review 115 (4): 415-448.
  • "Trans-World Identification and Stipulation" (1996) Philosophical Studies 84(2-3): 203-223.
  • "Wholes, Parts, and Numbers" (1997) in Philosophical Perspectives, 11, Mind, Causation, and World, James Tomberlin (ed). Blackwell, Boston.
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