I think – Mrs. Smith thinks

ABSTRACT

It has been recognized that ‘I think a is F’, considered as a predicative statement, is peculiar. The peculiarity comes out in Moore’s paradox, ‘a is F, but I do not think it is’. This statement appears afflicted by an inner tension. But if the logical form of ‘I think a is F’ is that of a predicative statement, then it is hard to discern a tension in what is said. The correlative statement ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ appears to be free from peculiarity. There seems to be no tension in ‘a is F; but Mrs. Smith thinks it is not’. Hence lining up ‘I think a is F’ with ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ we can retain our understanding of the former as predicative. This essay will bring out that ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ is, if anything, more peculiar than ‘I think a is F’, and that, should we have been inclined to think of the latter as a predicative statement, consideration of ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ must disabuse us of this idea.

KEYWORDS:

• Moore's paradox
• transparency
• contradiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I consider statements as expressing what she who makes them thinks. Any further significance a statement may have, in general or in a given context, is irrelevant to my concern. Hence I move freely between ‘thought’ and ‘statement’. The reason why I conduct the discussion not only in terms of thoughts but also in terms of statements emerges in part three: the nexus of speaking, fundamentally speaking against, counter-speech or contradiction, constitutes thought as such.

2 In ‘The First Person’ (in Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, cf. p. 32), G. E. M. Anscombe maintains that ‘I’ is not used to make reference to an object. She has not been understood by everyone therewith to reject the idea that ‘I am F’ expresses a predication. Indeed, she has been represented as understanding ‘I am F’ to be a special form of predication, namely, self-predication. The present essay rejects that for the case of ‘I think a is F’. (Of course this entails that it must be rejected throughout, since ‘I’, everywhere, is a thinker’s thought of herself as a thinker. But this lies beyond the scope of this essay.) Further, Ans­combe appears to think that she who uses ‘I’ may be an object of reference; she may be referred to, for example, by a use of ‘this animal’. The present essay rejects that, too. ‘The First Person’ should be read together with ‘Has Mankind One Soul – An Angle Distributed Through Many Bodies?’ (in Anscombe, Human Life, Action, and Ethics, Exeter: Imprint Academics 2005), a lecture Anscombe delivered in 1985. There she explains why it is puzzling how there can be more than one thinker. The present essay can be read as resolving this puzzlement. Ans­combe is explicit that she does not know how to think about it with clarity.

3 In this resides the significance of that way of knowing and thus of transparency. If the statement ‘I think p’ raises the question how it can be predicative insofar as it is considered as stating something known in this way, then that question is raised by its character as a first person thought.

4 The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982, p. 225.

5 G. E. Moore gives a different explanation of the appearance of a tension:

What is asserted by saying these two things [‘Dogs bark but I don’t know that they do’ and ‘Dogs bark but I do not believe they do’] is something which might well be true: there is no contradiction in it. But it would be quite absurd for anyone to say these two things, because though what he would be asserting would be something which might quite well be true, yet by asserting that dogs bark, he implies, though he does not assert and though it does not follow from what he does assert, in the one case that he knows that dogs bark and in the other that he doesn’t believe they don’t. (Wittgenstein in Cambridge, Brian McGuinnes, ed., Malden, MA: Blackwell 2008, pp. 365–366)

Moore distinguishes what someone asserts from what she implies, asserting it. Asserting that a is F and that she does not believe this, she implies that she believes that a is F. What she thus implies contradicts what she asserts, as she asserts that she does not believe a is F. This will make it absurd for anyone to assert ‘a is F and I do not believe this’, if anyone who asserts something holds together in one consciousness what she asserts and what she implies. A further development of Moore’s explanation would need to explore that unity of consciousness. We need not pursue this because a distinction of what is said from what is implied is needed to explain the absurdity of saying ‘a is F and I do not believe this’ only if there is no absurdity in thinking ‘a is F and I do not believe this’. If there is, then it explains the absurdity of saying it when, saying it, one says what one thinks. The present essay is concerned with the absurdity of thinking ‘a is F and I do not believe this’. While Evans considers statements of the form ‘I think a is F’, his interest is not in what one might imply by saying such a thing, but in what someone understands, understanding what she says, saying such a thing. (Cf., for example, The Varieties of Reference, p. 92.) It is with this interest that I consider statements. Cf. footnote 1.

6 And that the object of which something is said in such a statement be understood to be determinable by indefinitely many predicates.

7 We may also suppose that she does both things – describe something as thinking a is F and describe another thing as being F – in one breath. Then the contradiction is with what she says insofar as she says a is F. She happens to say something else in addition, namely something about a certain mind and how things stand with it. It is straightforward to adapt the argument to follow to this supposition.

8 In a discussion at a conference in Basel in 2009, Anselm W. Müller put forth the argument that follows.

9 All manner of psychological connections may be postulated. This will not touch the point above. The only account of the logical form of ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ of which I am aware according to which in this context ‘a is F’ is used to refer to a and predicate of it being F is Davidson’s paratactic account. (Cf. ‘Saying that’, in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984.) This account explicitly refuses to satisfy the requirement laid down above: that, in one and the same thought, I think what Mrs. Smith thinks and comprehend it to be thought by Mrs. Smith. So the aporia presented by current accounts of the logical form of ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ is this: either I understand what Mrs. Smith thinks to be thought by Mrs. Smith, then I do not, in this thought, think it. Or I think what Mrs. Smith thinks, then I do not in the same thought understand it to be thought by Mrs. Smith. (Here especially I am indebted to extended conversations with Adrian Haddock.)

10 We concluded part II finding that the one thing said with ‘I think a is F’ is none other than what is said with ‘a is F’. Thus Mrs. Smith contradicts me, who say, ‘a is not F’, saying ‘I think a is F’. It may have seemed that therewith we have lost all difference of ‘I think a is F’ from ‘a is F’. Then thinking ‘a is not F, but Mrs. Smith thinks it is’ is thinking ‘a is F and a is not F’. And thinking this, I do not contradict anyone, but think a contradiction. This presupposes that we understand, independently of reflecting on ‘I think’ and ‘Mrs. Smith thinks’, contradiction in what is thought. But the idea of contradiction of things thought is none other than the idea of contradiction of subjects thinking. Seeing that we can cancel ‘I think’, as it does not enlarge what is thought, and reduce ‘I think a is F’ to ‘a is F’, therefore is seeing that we can expand ‘a is F’ to ‘I think a is F’, as thinking ‘a is F’ is being conscious of its opposition to thinking ‘a is not F’.

11 Peter F. Strawon, Individuals, London: Methuen 1959, pp. 99–100.