Donnellanian implicature

Speranza


Donnellan writes:

"Given present circumstances, the correct thing to say is that all whales are mammals."

"But whether this is, as we intend it, a necessary truth or contingent is indeterminate."

What is his reason for thinking it indeterminate?

Donnellan's reason for thinking it indeterminate is that our present use of such an analytic sentence, while correct now, should not be expected to hold for all hypothetical cases.

It is true that, at present, whales are mammals.

But whether this is an analytic or a contingent truth is indeterminate because the decision rests upon our being able to predict the outcome of all hypothetical cases, and this we cannot do.

In other words, the criteria of the application of the term mammal to the total possible class of whales is indeterminate and thus not permanently fixed in advance of possible further empirical discoveries.

What is Donnellan's basic reason for thinking that an alleged analytic sentence like "Whales are mammals" does not express a necessary truth? (He did his PhD dissertation on the foundations of necessary truth alla C. I. Lewis, and Grice was defending the dogma of the analytic-synthetic distinction at the same time).
 

Donnellan's basic reason is that our present use of such an analytic sentence, while correct now, should not be expected to hold for all hypothetical cases. It is true that, at present, whales are mammals.

But whether this is an analytic or a contingent truth is indeterminate because the decision rests upon our being able to predict the outcome of all hypothetical cases, and this we cannot do.

In other words, the criteria of the application of the term "mammal" to the total possible class of whales is indeterminate and thus not permanently fixed in advance of possible further empirical discoveries.

Donnellan has other, related reasons why "whales are mammals" is not analytic, the primary one being that one must either be taught or learn, perhaps from a dictionary, that a whale is a mammal.

Grice liked to say that he'd bring Grice to the Mill.

Do Millians like Donnellan and Kripke have a problem in formulating the claim of atheism? If so, what is it? Can it be overcome?

Yes, such Millians as Donnellan and Kripke do have a problem in formulating the claim of atheism.

The problem stems from their direct reference account of meaning.

In the Millian view, proper names have denotation, but not connotation.

Thus, since for Millians a name acquires its semantic value solely from its referent, Millians cannot explain the meaning of negative existential statements and other statements in which the referent is uncertain.

For example, the sentence, "God does not exist" poses a problem for Millians because on their account, since the referent of "God" is uncertain, they cannot explain how the sentence nevertheless has meaning, as it intuitively does. Millians would be forced to say the sentence has no meaning when in fact it does.

The problem can be overcome only by introducing a notion of sense into the Millians' theory.

By introducing sense, the direct reference theory, of course, collapses into a broader account of meaning, one that reconciles the strong intuitions of the Millians -- that proper names derive meaning not from the descriptions or properties associated with them -- with the power that the notion of sense gives a theory in accounting for such problems as negative existential statements.

The trick is that the notion of sense must be construed so narrowly that it does not associate a name with descriptive properties of the bearer.

One possibility, expounded by Katz, would be to define the sense of an expression as the aspect of its structure that determines its sense properties. On this view, the sense of a proper noun would have the form The thing which is a bearer of `N'. The theory, that is, must be a pure metalinguistic one.