What should we say about Rip Van Winkle?
Rip Van Winkle acquired a belief the day he fell
asleep---July 3, 1766, say---a belief that that day was a
fine day. He held this belief under the character ``Today
[the day of this thought] is nice.'' Then he slept for twenty
years and two days, until July 5, 1786, and walked back to
town.
What happened next?
The possibility that struck Kaplan and Evans is that Rip merely updated his belief. On July 3rd he never forms any explicit belief other than ``Today [the day of this thought] is a nice day''. When he awakes on July 5th, the belief is updated, due to his awareness of having slept through a night, and his lack of awareness of having slept twenty additinal years, to ``Yesterday [the day before the day of this thought] was a nice day.'' He falls out of epsitemic contact with the current day when he falls asleep, but has a ready-made character in mind for when he wakes up. But then what is there left of the original belief except the false one about July 4th? But the false belief can not be the true belief, so hasn't Rip lost the belief in question? This seems to be the argument that threatened Kaplan and appealed to Evans.
But even in the case of such thin updating, there are backup characters for Rip to hold his belief under. When Rip believes, towards evening, as it grows dark, ``Today [the day of this thought] was a nice day,'' he has memories of seeing the flowers and feeling the sun, and so forth. So the character, ``That day [the day I remember] is or was a nice day'' is available to sustain his belief, when the attempt at updating goes awry. Even if these memories fade, there is the character, ``That day [the day this belief was acquired] is or was a nice day.''
So my view is this. When he awakes on July 5th, Rip updates his belief according to his view of how the context has changed. His view about the change of context is mistaken, and the new character, ``Yesterday [the day before the day of this thought] was nice'' is not a way of believing the original content. But that is no reason to say that Rip has lost his original belief. He retains it under various other backup characters.
That's what I have to say about Rip; what about the other concrete characters that figure in our story, Frege, Kaplan and Evans?
We can't pin anything much on Frege, for we can't hold him responsible for the strategy about belief that his remark on saying inspired. We could consider whether he was right about saying, but we won't do that in this essay.
The strategy that Frege's remark suggested to Kaplan and Evans is that retaining belief consists in moving from flighty character to flighty character in ways that reflect change in context. I think I have refuted that strategy.
But my own strategy is the broad interpretation of the Frege-inspired one, generalized and freed from its association with his particular example. The detach-and-recognize strategy for handling information itself embodies a regular transition, from strong characters to loyal characters and, when recognition occurs, back to strong characters. This Frege-inspired doctrine, like most, perhaps, is inadequate when construed narrowly, plausible when given a broader interpretation.
We can't fault Kaplan for thinking that there was more to be said about Rip Van Winkle for in this he was correct. Evans was wrong, I think, about Rip and about Kaplan. But much of what I have said is similar in spirit to ideas one finds in the body of his work. I will end with a couple of remarks on interpreting Evans.
In approaching Evans, it seems to me one must try to separate his own information-oriented approach to things from the devotion to a version of Frege filtered through Davidson that crops up now and then, most especially in ``Understanding Demonstratives,'' the essay from which the quote above was taken.
Davidson's reliance on Tarski and T-sentences in explaining his views on meaning has inspired a tradition in semantics that one might call ``homogeneous meaning explanation.'' We explain the meaning of a sentence by using the same sentence, or one with the same meaning. The work of Kaplan belongs squarely in the tradition of ``heterogeneous meaning explanation''. One explains the meaning of a sentence by showing, using whatever language one might want, what sort of tool it is, how it conveys various things in various circumstances.
Imagine that you are explaining a Mercator projection map to a child. One way of explaining, perhaps, is to use another Mercator projection map. A better way is to use a globe. I think the benefits of heterogeneous over homogeneous explanation are similar.
As Davidson himself notes, the homogeneous strategy works with
indexicals only when one supposes that the semanticist's explanation
and the statement explained are made by the same person at the same
time. One interpretation
of ``Understanding Demonstratives,'' is that Evans tries, using a
variety of ideas that are interesting in their own right but are not
necessarily well-suited to the purpose, to extend the homogeneous
treatment of indexicals beyond the special case in which it works. I
think this experiment fails. And I also think that the
information-oriented approach that one finds in much of Evans work,
and in parts of ``Understanding Demonstratives,'' is basically
heterogeneous in its implications for semantics.