 I feel like I should sit down and listen to the guy who was described by Mark and John. Thank you all very much for being here. I think as Mark conveyed I have to feel very very lucky to be here. I say, I mean people don't ever ask me this, but I often tell them anyway that I have the best job in the world. This is the best job in the world and I feel very lucky to be here and I'm very flattered that all of you are here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a little bit of philosophy, a little bit of philosophy of language and the title and the abstract promised you that I would talk about why the world is safe for metaphysics and other clueless theorizers. And it's gonna sound to you as I go through the talk that what I'm actually discussing is classical philology and geography and things that in general don't sound or seem like metaphysics to those who have any passing, any passing familiarity with the subject. But I assure you that the whole time I am talking about metaphysics and that's because I'm gonna be talking about the conditions under which some bit of terminology picks out delineates a certain subject matter, refers to it. And the problem that I'm going to address concerns what it is that makes it the case that some little bit of language picks out or refers to a particular subject matter. So the question is what makes that the case or in virtue of what is that the case? And it turns out the answer might seem straightforward but it's not altogether straightforward. So here is a dispute that you might have in classical philology. So one classicist might claim that Homer was an actual historical figure. Another that Homer is a completely mythical character made up by somebody along the way. A third that Homer is some amalgam of several historical individuals with a thick layer of myth overlaid. And as you're listening to this dispute it might strike you that the disputants appear to have no common conception of what the nature of the thing that they're talking about is. So if you were to ask for instance somebody who held the first view that Homer was an actual historical figure, who are you talking about? Who's this Homer guy you're talking about? Then if they were particularly honest and conscientious they might give you a speech like this. Well I think that this is an actual historical figure who wrote certain poems. But to tell the truth the historical evidence is not dispositive. So maybe Homer is not a he but an it, amalgam, a group of individuals. Or maybe it's nothing at all. And after he gives you this speech you might think to yourself actually there's a certain sense in which this person doesn't really know what he's talking about. We have radical ignorance concerning the nature of the very thing that's whose features are under dispute. Okay, here's what this has to do with metaphysics rather than classical philology. This is the usual case in metaphysics. So Mark mentioned that I am writing a book on grounding. Grounding is the notion that is expressed by that in virtue of what expression right there at the beginning of that question. So I work on that idea. And as a matter of fact if you start to say the first interesting thing about the features that that idea has you get an academic food fight almost immediately. Nobody can agree, there's no universal agreement at least, among the experts on what the nature of whatever it is we're talking about when we're talking about what it is in virtue of which something is the case is. All right. So we don't have any very good conception of what it is we're talking about. And in a certain sense we don't know what we're talking about. How then could we be talking about something? What makes it the case that we're nevertheless talking about a particular individual? Along comes the causal historical theory of reference and I can't resist quoting this passage from its progenitor Saul Kripke in Naming Necessity in 1970. So Kripke is trying to give expression to a similar question. How is it that people who use the word Richard Feynman but don't really know who he is? How do they manage to talk about him rather than say Murray Gellman or some other relatively moderately famous physicist? And here's his answer. Someone's born, his parents call him by a certain name, they talk about him to their friends, other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. A certain passage of communication reaching ultimately to the man himself Richard Feynman does reach the speaker. The speaker is then referring to Feynman rather than Gellman even though the speaker can't identify Feynman uniquely. So what's the idea here? The idea here is that by and large we have uses of expressions that are derived from other people's uses of expressions. So now if you didn't before you have the use of the name Richard Feynman. You have no very particular particularly good idea of who Feynman is, right? Your use is derived. How do you manage to talk about that guy? Well you manage to talk about him because although you don't know who he is, your use is derived via a use, a chain of use transmission from somebody's use and that person knows who he is. So you are borrowing that person's ability to isolate a reference for his name Richard Feynman and deploying that. So the original uses are going to refer in virtue of the users associating conditions that single out the reference. So in the case of Feynman the original users are presumably his parent and if somebody asks the parent who is Richard Feynman at the beginning then they would probably say this child here. Okay that doesn't much help metaphysics because it relies on the idea that the original users of the expression know what the heck they're talking about and I am here to tell you that in metaphysics this is often not the case. Even original users of the expression make claims about the nature of the subject matter that's under discussion that are hotly disputed and if the person is reasonable they will recognize that although they have an opinion on the matter that opinion doesn't amount to anything like firm knowledge. Okay fortunately or perhaps unfortunately the same thing happens for ordinary proper nouns in ordinary language and this is known as the Madagascar problem. So here's a little bit of etymological and geographical history. So in the case of Madagascar says Isaac Taylor a hearsay report of Malay or Arab sailors misunderstood by Marco Polo has had the effect of transferring a corrupt form of the name of a portion of the African mainland Madagascar the word is etymologically related it turns out to Mogadishu and the word that Marco Polo picked up was a word for that area of the world emphatically not an island right okay. So it transferred a corrupt form of the name of a portion of the African mainland to the great African island so that's what happened. So I'm going to indulge in a little bit of historical make-believe because the actual story is quite complicated but you're to imagine there's Marco Polo in the middle and he had a source according to Taylor and Arab or Malay sailor who said something about Madagascar using the word Madagascar right okay and Marco Polo picks that up makes a mistake messes up and then inscribes in his diary Madagascar is the great island off the coast of East Africa that formed the source for a memoir that was published in Renaissance Italy right and now C is you you're using the word Madagascar and you might be instructing for instance a child in geography you might be telling that Madagascar is the great island off the coast of East Africa okay here's some facts first your use there up see that's derived by a historical chain of use transmission from a down there right and when you say that Madagascar when you tell the child Madagascar is the great island off the coast of East Africa what you say is true and it's true because when you say Madagascar you're talking about an island not about Mogadishu right um but a does not refer to that island so it looks like we've got a use that's derived from an original use but the referent of the original use is not the referent of the derived use so that looks like a problem for the causal historical theory of reference and now for the sake of exposition I'm gonna make a supposition this is a harmless supposition and as I said there's reason to believe it's historically false but I'm gonna suppose just for the sake of illustration that when Marco Polo wrote Madagascar it's a great island off the coast of East Africa in his diary that was the first use in the history of the universe of a word Madagascar that refers to the island so Marco Polo is the first user of Madagascar to refer to the island right okay so let's look at some extant proposals for how to deal with this kind of case case of reference switch so what I'm gonna do this is a plan is I'm gonna talk about the Madagascar problem then I'm gonna talk about a different problem one so the Madagascar problem's been discussed a lot in the literature so the problem has been discussed almost not at all so I'm gonna talk about a different problem and I'm going to emphasize certain similarities between the two problems that's strategic because I think both problems have the same solution and then if I have time I'll look at objections all right so first proposal Marco Polo initiated a use of Madagascar for the island okay he wasn't trying to he was trying to convey information he messed up though so how come his use refers to the island answer his use refers to the island in virtue of him having associated the condition being the great island so if you asked if you asked Marco Polo hey Marco Polo what's this Madagascar thing you're talking about he would say hey it's the great island off the coast of East Africa right okay there's a problem and the problem is that he also associated different a different condition and a condition which singles out something else that is he also associated the condition being whatever my sources were talking about when they said Madagascar right and in fact this is a condition where he defers to his sources this deferential condition go ask my sources presumably characterizes his dispositions to identify a reference so let's suppose just after Marco Polo as inscribed Madagascar is the great island off the east coast of Africa he'd gotten a postcard from God or an angel whispering in his ear saying by the way Marco Polo nobody in the history of the universe has ever used Madagascar to refer to an island in fact your sources used whatever word they used Mogadishu maybe to refer to an an area on the African mainland right then presumably if he were a reasonable fellow he might have been disposed at that point to say oops I screwed up scratch out his entry and say Madagascar's not an island so he might be disposed to withdraw the claim that Madagascar is an island when he finds out that the island is not what his sources were talking about okay so we've got these two conditions both associated by Marco Polo with his use of the name Madagascar his inaugural use of the name Madagascar one of them singles out an island and the other singles out an area of the African mainland and now we need to know from the proponent of proposal one what makes the island one the right one right we've got two conditions they don't agree how come we should go with the island one rather than the mainland one okay second proposal second proposal is this that Marco Polo Marco Polo's use refers to the island in virtue of the islands being the dominant causal source of his associated body of information so he could be highly mistaken about the nature of the thing that he's responding to but as long as that island is the thing that he's responding to is the thing that is sending information his way that he's organizing into his diary under an entry Madagascar as long as that's the causal source then he's referring to the island he's referring to that dominant causal source okay so this is a little bit of historical make believe again because Madagascar was not the dominant causal source of his associated body of information but let's just assume for the sake of argument that this is right right okay this faces a problem so here's the problem let's suppose that I have been deputized by the FBI to find whitey bulger who is public enemy number one and they've received a tip that bulger is going to be at a philosophy talk at UVM on a certain date right and so following that tip I come to the talk and I find somebody who resembles whitey bulger in the mugshot and I say aha I found him and I start texting back to the FBI dozens of messages right whitey bulger is sitting with his right law right leg crossed over his left he's got a brown jacket and a red sweater on and so on and so forth right I'm extremely verbose and I keep this up for as long as it takes somewhere between a few seconds and a few decades for this person to be the dominant causal source of the information that I associate with the name whitey bulger right okay the problem is this okay so here's Johnny Depp right if you're familiar with philosophy examples and you may have already guessed that this is not whitey bulger right this is a lookalike a dead ringer right okay so this man right here is the dominant causal source of my associated body of information but my reports are false I've been taken in bulgers not here he's not the reference of my uses of whitey bulger despite the fact that I'm getting the bulk of my information from right here and in fact there seems to be no number of encounters with this man right here after which my reports will stop being false reports concerning the whereabouts and features of whitey bulger and start being true reports concerning the whereabouts and features of Johnny Depp so these are problems I think these problems with the extent of proposals are actually a symptom of a deeper problems I want to consider in detail that counterfactual case that I just described so Marco Polo inscribed the Madagascar sentence into his diary and then he's better informed about the nature of his situation and he withdraws right here seem to me some plausible claims first that his withdrawal would have been correct in that case he would have been correct to say nope Madagascar is not an island and on our assumptions that means that he would have been in a whitey bulger style case so what is this deeper problem with these proposals is actually every other proposal that I know of other than the nutty thing that I'm going to say here in just a moment you've got in each case you've got in this case an actual case in which that inscription of Madagascar refers to an island and a counterfactual case in which that inscription of Madagascar does not refer to an island and according to the associated conditions view Marco Polo is wrong in the actual case he's got this disposition to withdraw the claim when he is apprised of the nature of a situation according to the causal links view Marco Polo is wrong in the counterfactual case but both views seem wrong it seems like actually we've assumed this for the sake of argument Marco Polo is the very first person ever to use the word Madagascar to refer to an island but also in the counterfactual case he was correct when he said Madagascar is not an island was correct to withdraw his claim so it looks like we need a view which distinguishes between the actual and the counterfactual case so here's another problem and this is going to get us much closer to metaphysics okay so this I think well this is made up history but this is this plausibly tracks the causal history of our use of the name morning star right okay so we're to imagine somebody probably somebody Greek or Babylonian somebody like that let's use morning star to refer to the brightest star visible in the morning sky and then this person goes on to say and this is the first use of the word morning star the morning star is brighter than serious so let's suppose that that use B of morning star is the original use of the name right okay that refers to Venus that's where our one of our words for Venus came from right but serious not Venus satisfies the condition the brightest star visible in the morning sky why is that Venus isn't a star it's brighter it's not a star right okay so this it seems is what I'm going to call a bad dubbing a dubbing is an introduction of a name so a bad dubbing is a situation which somebody introduces a name I'm going to use the word morning star to refer to a certain thing and says what they're going to refer to they use a description the brightest star visible in the morning sky to say what it is they're talking about and they succeed halfway so they succeed in referring to something they managed to do it but this is what makes it bad what it refers to doesn't satisfy the description so Venus the reference of this original use of morning star is not the brightest star in the morning sky all right so how common is this how common is this phenomenon how often do we encounter bad dubbings well they seem to happen sometimes so here's some examples I won't go through the examples Morgan Stern is just a German name for morning star if you do metaphysics then you're constantly encountering them you're constantly encountering people who introduce technical terminology but they kind of misintroduce it they screw up the introduction in one way or the other right so again we have a problem the problem is this what makes it the case that original uses of expressions introduced in bad dubbings refer to particular individual rather than some other individual say the individual actually satisfies the description right okay two extant proposals these are going to seem very familiar to you first first proposal is Dubber dispositions so the proposal is this the Dubber the person who originates the name is disposed to identify the planet Venus as the reference to be when given the relevant astronomical information and there's a generalization to all cases which I won't worry about right okay there's an obvious problem with this which is this why do you think that's true right so you can imagine that morning star was introduced for religious purposes and it was very important for this religious observance that they single out the brightest star in the morning sky right if if that were the case and the person got a little postcard from God telling them the nature of their situation then it's plausible to think that they would be disposed to withdraw the assertion that the morning star is brighter than serious and where they would conclude the morning star is serious so we actually don't know what the Dubbers dispositions are and importantly we don't care we credit the Dubber with introducing a use of the term for Venus anyway right okay second proposal involves causal links so when the person says the morning star is brighter than Venus and their use of the morning star is responding to the planet not to any star that's what makes it the case that they're referring to the planet not to any star there are a variety of problems with this proposal but again there's a deeper problem again this diagram should look very familiar to you at this point so let's assume that the behavior on the right in the counterfactual case with a Dubber of the of the name morning star is told that's not a star and she withdraws as a result right then in the actual case we have an inaugural use of morning star and it refers to Venus in the counterfactual case the very same use does not refer to Venus refers instead to serious or so it seems according to the dispositions view the Dubbers wrong in the actual case according to the causal links view the Dubber is wrong in the counterfactual case and again it looks as if both views are wrong okay so time to say why the world is safe for metaphysics we've got some similarities here so we've got an actual case in which you have an original use of the name which refers to one thing and you've got a counterfactual case in which the original user is apprised of the nature of her situation and in the counterfactual case we're imagining that the user would have as a result of reasonable dispositions withdrawn the original claim the very claim that they actually made it seems as if the person would have been correct to do so and that in that situation their utterance would not have originated a use of the name for thing one maybe it would have originated a use of the name for thing to the area on the mainland or serious in the two cases maybe not so it looks as if in the counterfactual case the original use would not have referred to what it actually does so what we need is an explanation of the actual case that doesn't also apply to the counterfactual case to yield the conclusion the result the false result that say in the counterfactual case Marco Polos withdrawal of the claim that Madagascar is an island was mistaken he should have stuck to his guns or at least he would have spoke the truth if he stuck to his guns right okay so what's the difference between these two cases the answer I think is that in the two cases the very same act by the very same person puts them in a different social position so here's the case of the bad dubbing of Venus with the name the mooring star so in the actual case the originator stands at the beginning of a certain social practice a collective activity in which you have unwittingly participated so the originator stands at the beginning of the practice of using morning star to refer to Venus you're part of that practice by virtue of having a use of morning star derived from her use in the counterfactual case well she's not the beginning of any such practice okay so this is a philosophy talk we must have new terminology a referential practice is roughly a body of social practices associated with the use of a particular name like morning star Madagascar or some other expression to refer to something to eliminate some subject matter so in the actual case in the bad dubbing case the dumber inaugurates a referential practice that I'm going to call the morning star Venus referential practice it's the practice of using the word morning star to refer to Venus that's why I call it that it's got all the marks of a social institution so there are offices in this social institution you hold an office the office of participant user of the name so there are participants their experts their newbies their teachers and so on there are norms that characterize what participants are supposed to do with their proper role is so participants by and large for instance take assertive morning star utterances like the morning star is brighter than serious to be true or false depending on the features of Venus rather than say serious so that means that it's a norm of the practice that what I say the morning star is brighter than serious what I say is true rather than laughably false right there are various moves that you can make in this practice sometimes unwittingly so here's one move becoming a newbie by being initiated into the practice you might attempt to seize the role of expert by teaching somebody else by offering them an explanation of what it is that the morning star means or refers to and so on so it looks like it looks like we have all the marks of an informal unadmittedly informal social institution and we are all doing our part in the social institution in the counterfactual case we might be doing lots of stuff but we're not doing any of that right okay so here's my proposal that the dover's use of the word morning star is an original use of a name for Venus in virtue of the fact that it inaugurates a referential practice that use refers to Venus in virtue of the fact that the referential practice it inaugurates is a practice of using morning star to refer to Venus that's the view these two explanations carry over straightforwardly to the Madagascar case so Marco Polo didn't intend to initiate a social practice but he did and you participate okay now this paper has been around since 2013 and I have not tried to publish it and the reason I have not tried to publish it is in part because the view seems objectionable in a variety of ways so I want to talk about two objections do I have time to talk about two objections I do have time to talk about two objections the first objection is basically just an objection which is a very natural objection and which I'm going to discuss just to fill out the view just a little bit and the second objection really makes me worry okay so so here's the objection so we've got the original user person says the morning stars brighter than serious we say correct that's arrived uses you say the morning stars brighter than serious correct right okay so on the proposed view it looks like the original use refers to Venus because the subsequent uses do right and the subsequent uses refer to Venus because the original use does and that's a terrible explanation right we never explained what it is in virtue of which we refer to Venus we've got a circle right okay so the objection is basically on the right track it shows that we've been working with the wrong distinction so in the causal in the original statement of the causal historical theory that this distinction between derived uses of say Homer and original uses where in the best cases the originator knows what the heck they're talking about when they use the name that's the wrong distinction we're talking about social practices and we need to distinguish between derived uses and what I'm going to call authoritative uses so these are part of the norms that constitute the social practice of using morning star to refer to Venus right okay so which uses are the authoritative uses there are those uses whose associated conditions and causal ties to the putative subject matter do the reference fixing they determine what it is that the practice is a practice of referring to okay so now you're going to ask me okay I know in general what an authoritative use is supposed to be which uses are authoritative this is a little bit like asking who is the authority on the band kisses first three albums right this is an informal social institution and authority and these kinds of institutions is messy contested vague and so on that's life but the authorities are the ones who play the expert role in the referential practice and if you've ever had a conversation about kisses first three albums then you'll recognize that there are some people who style themselves experts and the rest of us right so in a lot of cases styling yourself an expert will be enough because people will let you fake it until you make it that's also the nature of an informal social institution so I think by the way that original uses are always authoritative because you say here's a new word uses in certain conversational contexts like naming ceremonies I hear by name this ship the Queen Elizabeth those are authoritative I think mapmaking may be an authoritative use so when the mapmaker writes Madagascar on a certain region of the map that has a certain air of authority when you read the textbook and you've got a little blue box around some particular term like you know by Madagascar we geographers refer to the great African island off the east coast great island off the east coast of Africa and as with kiss albums there's a high degree of de facto influence so is a significant element of serendipity in who counts as an authority right so there's the objections just reproduced up there for you the reply is this authoritative uses refer in virtue of associated conditions causal links and ties to whether authoritative uses in the same referential path practice so you can think of reference for the whole practice is determined by a vote so each use backs a candidate for a particular reference and each use has a weight the weight records the degree to which the use is authoritative authorities a matter of degree to right so Terrence is fairly authoritative on kiss albums and there are higher authorities okay who's the reference the reference is the winner of the weighted vote right okay so this allows us to give a very natural explanation of what's going on in that whitey bulger case so you've got the FBI FBI says this is whitey bulger they give you the mugshot okay so the mugshot in codes is basically a causal link to a particular man the man the shot is a mugshot of right okay the FBI's authority with respect to the whitey bulger practice is very high there's my use of whitey bulger my authority in the whitey bulger practice is nil and that's why no matter how many times I come into causal contact with Johnny Depp I can't switch the reference of what whitey bulger from the Boston criminal to the actor right my votes don't count okay again in the morning star we've got the originator so the originator says the morning star is brighter than Venus and they annunciate the condition being the brightest star visible in the morning sky and that happens to be serious that's a picture of serious over there supposed to be right the originator's authority is high right and then you've got astronomers and textbooks and so on and they're all saying the morning star is brighter than serious and they associate conditions with their use of the morning star that singles out Venus that's a picture of Venus over there in the morning sky their authority however is higher and this is one of the norms I don't have a lot of time to talk about this but one of the norms is this that you can acquire authority in a naming practice by being in a superior epistemic position so the astronomers and the textbook writers and so on know better whereof they speak than does the originator and that's why their authority is higher okay so that's the first objection and that just helps me limb the view here's the second objection is the one that worries me so this is a general claim to temporal inter internalism so basically what it says is this if you want to know what a speaker refers to on a given occasion want to know for instance what Marco Polo refers to on a given occasion when he inscribes in his diary Madagascar is the great island off the coast of East Africa then you got to look at conditions that obtain at the time or earlier right so the reference of a use of a term is determined by facts that are either contemporaneous with the occasion of use or in its past that's temporal internalism and it's highly plausible right the view that I've discussed I guess I haven't said this explicitly yet but the actual in the counterfactual cases with respect to Marco Polo's originating use of Madagascar they're exactly the same up to and through the occasion of use the inscription of Madagascar they differ only in what happens afterward so the view that I've just shopped for you is a view on which what happens at a future time makes it the case that Marco Polo's inscription right now refers to Madagascar rather than say to Mogadishu right okay so the objection is this temporal internalism is very plausible how can you bring about the past proposal at hand implies that temporal internalism is false so it inherits the implausibility okay this bugs me I have a couple of replies I do think temporal internalism is very plausible in the abstracts one of those general principles it sounds pretty good when you first hear it it's also true in most cases so the Madagascar case is a pretty weird case most cases are like the Feynman case right where the parents referent looks like it's more authoritative the parents use looks like it's more authoritative than subsequent uses of Richard Feynman with the possible exception of Feynman himself so so in that case you don't need to reach for review which violates temporal internalism but it does seem to me that there are clear counter examples they will strike you as weird but that's because it's temporal internalism is true in most cases all right so here's here's a linguistic stipulation I'm actually doing this right now so I want to introduce a new word Newman to it's called Newman to because this is modeled on an example of David Kaplan's where the introduced name was Newman one okay so I hereby stipulate that Newman to in my mouth is to refer to the first person born in the 22nd century according to whatever timekeeping conventions are enforced as of 11 p.m. 31st December 2099 okay so here's a little bit of history did you know that the island nation of Samoa moved the international dateline in 2012 so they basically leap forward two days at midnight okay so they're now more or less the very first highly populated place where the 22nd century begins okay so I'm pretty confident they're not going to switch back like they switched because they wanted to be on Australian and New Zealand time didn't want to be on American time basically right so I'm pretty confident they're not going to be switched back so here's my conjecture Newman to the first baby to be born in the 22nd century according to whatever timekeeping conventions are in place on at midnight on 31 December 2099 that Newman to will be born in Samoa that's my conjecture it's either right or wrong right and it'll be right or wrong depending on who Newman to is right however who Newman to is may depend on future timekeeping conventions so for instance if Samoa switches back and decides to go with American Samoa again then Newman to will not be born in Samoa right okay so that is the failure of temporal internalism because whether my conjecture the conjecture that I just enunciated is correct depends on what happens in 2099 what happens in the future okay so temporal and internalism highly plausible but in weird cases it fails and it just so happens that an awful lot of metaphysics may turn out to be a highly weird case so let me end with a coda how should you interpret somebody who offers a new bit of terminology in the course of theorizing happens more or less constantly right so here's what they say let in refer to the Phi where Phi you just fill in the blank with some condition or other right like the first child to be born in the 22nd century according to the timekeeping conventions in place on 31st December midnight 31st December 2099 okay that's what they say very very simple this is actually on the view that I've said that I've sketched here this is actually a very complicated move in a certain social practice so here's what they're saying here's a new bit of vocabulary and I think we'll find it useful I think it refers to the Phi I'm gonna go on to use this new term do it us to ascribe to its reference some features that I think it has please join me in reasoning for now on the presumption that in as a reference and that the reference is uniquely Phi let's investigate together information may come to light that that presumption leads to trouble of some sort if so then some revision may be called for look this is metaphysics this investigation is going to go on for a while I may not be there to help you decide how to revise the presumption I am after all mortal please do the best you can thank you very much