Gareth Evans (philosopher)
Encyclopedia
Gareth Evans was a British
philosopher.
, Oxford (1964–67). His philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson. He then became a senior scholar at Christ Church, Oxford
(1967–68) and a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University
and University of California, Berkeley
(1968–69). He died in 1980 of lung cancer at the age of 34, "a serious loss for British philosophy" according to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy. His collected papers (1985) and a book, The Varieties of Reference (1982), edited by John McDowell
, were published posthumously.
, metaphysics
, philosophy of language
, and philosophy of mind
. Aside from Strawson, Michael Dummett
and John McDowell
were important influences on his work.
Evans was one of many in the UK who took up the project of developing formal semantics
for natural language
s, instigated by Donald Davidson
in the 1960s and 1970s. He co-edited Truth and Meaning (1976) with John McDowell
on this subject. He also wrote a paper, "The Causal Theory of Names" (1973), which heavily criticized certain lines of the theory of reference
that derived from Saul Kripke
's Naming and Necessity
(1972/1980) and work by Keith Donnellan
.
A one-page paper in Analysis, "Can There Be Vague Objects?" (1978), drew dozens of papers in response and is now considered a key work in metaphysics.
is a description of its object: so, for example, Aristotle
means the author of De Caelo
. This was Russell
's view, and was and is taken by many to be equivalent to Frege
's view (where the description is what Frege calls a term's "sense"). Following Kripke
's Naming and Necessity (1972/1980) lectures, the view came to prevail that names had no descriptive content, or sense: that the referent of a name was not what "fit" its meaning, but whichever object had been the initial cause of the name's being used.
From Russell's work, Evans also draws the point that some of the thoughts one has (thoughts about objects one is perceiving, for example) are such that if their object did not exist it would not be possible to think that thought at all. These he calls Russellian thoughts.
He then claims that a certain version of the new theory, which he calls the Photograph Model of mental representation (1982, p. 78), violates Russell's Principle. According to the Photograph Model, "the causal antecedents of the information involved in a mental state... are claimed to be sufficient to determine which object the state concerns" (1982, p. 78). (The view is so named because it is similar to the view many people take on how a photograph comes to be about something.) Thus, on the Photograph Model, contrary to Russell's Principle, one may have a thought about some object without discriminating knowledge of that object, just so long as the mental state is caused in the appropriate way (for example, perhaps by some sort of causal chain that originates with the object).
Evans argues that any causal theory, like that of the Photograph Model, must be restricted in certain ways: it is necessary to consider, one by one, the various kinds of Russellian thoughts people can have about objects, and to specify in each case what conditions must be met for them to meet Russell's Principle—only under those conditions can one have a thought about a specific object or objects (a singular thought).
In particular, Evans discusses at length what he calls the Generality Constraint. Evans states it thus:
The Generality Constraint, according to Evans, is intended to capture the structure that there is in thought. As Evans puts it, "The thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that Harry is happy, and the thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that John is sad" (1982, p. 100). The Generality Constraint requires that if one is to have a thought (that John is happy, for example) about an object (John), then one must be able to conceive of the object (John) as having different properties (such as being sad).
He also defends a reading of Frege, derived in part from Michael Dummett
's work, according to which Frege's notion of sense is not equivalent to a description, and indeed remains essential to a theory of reference that abandoned descriptivism
(1982, §1.3).
He considers first demonstrative
reference, where one speaks or thinks about an object visible in one's vicinity. He argues that these presuppose, among other things: having a correct conception of the kind of object that it is; the ability to conceive of it and oneself as located in an objective space, and to orient oneself within that space; that one must move smoothly through time and space and be able to track the object's movements continuously in perception.
He next considers reference to oneself and then reference by way of a capacity for recognition: one's ability to (re-)identify an object when presented with it, even if it is not available at present. Evans famously considers the phenomenon of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification--a phenomenon of certain types of judgment in which one cannot be wrong about which object the judgment is about by misidentifying it (see his 1982, especially §6.6 & §7.2). This phenomenon may be exemplified by the incoherence of the following judgment (upon feeling pain): "Someone seems to be feeling pain, but is it I who is feeling the pain?". While this phenomenon has been noticed by philosophers before, Evans argues that they have tended to think that it only applies to judgments concerning oneself and one's conscious experiences, and so they have failed to recognize that it is a more general phenomenon that can occur in any sort of demonstrative judgment. Furthermore, he would charge philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein
(in his Blue and Brown Books [1958]) and Elizabeth Anscombe (in her "The First Person" [1975]) for having wrongly concluded that such cases show that the first-person pronoun "I" does not refer to anything.
, Reference and Existence).
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
philosopher.
Life
Gareth Evans studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at University CollegeUniversity College, Oxford
.University College , is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2009 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £110m...
, Oxford (1964–67). His philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson. He then became a senior scholar at Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...
(1967–68) and a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
(1968–69). He died in 1980 of lung cancer at the age of 34, "a serious loss for British philosophy" according to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy. His collected papers (1985) and a book, The Varieties of Reference (1982), edited by John McDowell
John McDowell
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work...
, were published posthumously.
Work
In his brief career Evans made substantial contributions to logicLogic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
, and philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
. Aside from Strawson, Michael Dummett
Michael Dummett
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt is a British philosopher. He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford...
and John McDowell
John McDowell
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work...
were important influences on his work.
Evans was one of many in the UK who took up the project of developing formal semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
for natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
s, instigated by Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton...
in the 1960s and 1970s. He co-edited Truth and Meaning (1976) with John McDowell
John McDowell
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work...
on this subject. He also wrote a paper, "The Causal Theory of Names" (1973), which heavily criticized certain lines of the theory of reference
Reference
Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...
that derived from Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
's Naming and Necessity
Naming and Necessity
Naming and Necessity is a book by the philosopher Saul Kripke that was first published in 1980 and deals with the debates of proper nouns in the philosophy of language. The book is based on a transcript of three lectures given at Princeton University in 1970...
(1972/1980) and work by Keith Donnellan
Keith Donnellan
Keith Donnellan is a contemporary philosopher and Professor Emeritus of the UCLA department of Philosophy. He has made important contributions to the philosophy of language, most notably to the analysis of proper names and definite descriptions...
.
A one-page paper in Analysis, "Can There Be Vague Objects?" (1978), drew dozens of papers in response and is now considered a key work in metaphysics.
Varieties of Reference
Evans's book The Varieties of Reference (1982) was unfinished at the time of his death. It was edited for publication, and supplemented with appendices drawn from his notes, by McDowell, and has subsequently been influential in both philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.Background
The theory of reference prior to the 1970s was dominated by the view that the meaning of an ordinary nameName
A name is a word or term used for identification. Names can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. A personal name identifies a specific unique and identifiable individual person, and may or may not include a middle name...
is a description of its object: so, for example, Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
means the author of De Caelo
On the Heavens
On the Heavens is Aristotle's chief cosmological treatise: it contains his astronomical theory and his ideas on the concrete workings of the terrestrial world...
. This was Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
's view, and was and is taken by many to be equivalent to Frege
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
's view (where the description is what Frege calls a term's "sense"). Following Kripke
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
's Naming and Necessity (1972/1980) lectures, the view came to prevail that names had no descriptive content, or sense: that the referent of a name was not what "fit" its meaning, but whichever object had been the initial cause of the name's being used.
Evans's project
Evans concedes that names do not in general have descriptive meanings (although he contends that they could, in some cases), but argues that the proponents of the new theory had much too simplistic a view. He argues for what he calls Russell's Principle: that a person cannot be thinking about an object unless he knows, in some non-trivial way, which object he is thinking about. In particular, Evans argues that a person must have a "discriminating conception" of the object (1982, p. 65).From Russell's work, Evans also draws the point that some of the thoughts one has (thoughts about objects one is perceiving, for example) are such that if their object did not exist it would not be possible to think that thought at all. These he calls Russellian thoughts.
He then claims that a certain version of the new theory, which he calls the Photograph Model of mental representation (1982, p. 78), violates Russell's Principle. According to the Photograph Model, "the causal antecedents of the information involved in a mental state... are claimed to be sufficient to determine which object the state concerns" (1982, p. 78). (The view is so named because it is similar to the view many people take on how a photograph comes to be about something.) Thus, on the Photograph Model, contrary to Russell's Principle, one may have a thought about some object without discriminating knowledge of that object, just so long as the mental state is caused in the appropriate way (for example, perhaps by some sort of causal chain that originates with the object).
Evans argues that any causal theory, like that of the Photograph Model, must be restricted in certain ways: it is necessary to consider, one by one, the various kinds of Russellian thoughts people can have about objects, and to specify in each case what conditions must be met for them to meet Russell's Principle—only under those conditions can one have a thought about a specific object or objects (a singular thought).
In particular, Evans discusses at length what he calls the Generality Constraint. Evans states it thus:
...if a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, then he must have the conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is G, for every property of being G of which he has a conception (1982, p. 104).
The Generality Constraint, according to Evans, is intended to capture the structure that there is in thought. As Evans puts it, "The thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that Harry is happy, and the thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that John is sad" (1982, p. 100). The Generality Constraint requires that if one is to have a thought (that John is happy, for example) about an object (John), then one must be able to conceive of the object (John) as having different properties (such as being sad).
He also defends a reading of Frege, derived in part from Michael Dummett
Michael Dummett
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt is a British philosopher. He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford...
's work, according to which Frege's notion of sense is not equivalent to a description, and indeed remains essential to a theory of reference that abandoned descriptivism
Descriptivist theory of names
Descriptivist theory of names is a view of the nature of the meaning and reference of proper names generally attributed to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell...
(1982, §1.3).
Kinds of reference
The bulk of the text considers three kinds of reference to objects, and argues for a number of conditions that must obtain for reference to occur.He considers first demonstrative
Demonstrative
In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...
reference, where one speaks or thinks about an object visible in one's vicinity. He argues that these presuppose, among other things: having a correct conception of the kind of object that it is; the ability to conceive of it and oneself as located in an objective space, and to orient oneself within that space; that one must move smoothly through time and space and be able to track the object's movements continuously in perception.
He next considers reference to oneself and then reference by way of a capacity for recognition: one's ability to (re-)identify an object when presented with it, even if it is not available at present. Evans famously considers the phenomenon of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification--a phenomenon of certain types of judgment in which one cannot be wrong about which object the judgment is about by misidentifying it (see his 1982, especially §6.6 & §7.2). This phenomenon may be exemplified by the incoherence of the following judgment (upon feeling pain): "Someone seems to be feeling pain, but is it I who is feeling the pain?". While this phenomenon has been noticed by philosophers before, Evans argues that they have tended to think that it only applies to judgments concerning oneself and one's conscious experiences, and so they have failed to recognize that it is a more general phenomenon that can occur in any sort of demonstrative judgment. Furthermore, he would charge philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
(in his Blue and Brown Books [1958]) and Elizabeth Anscombe (in her "The First Person" [1975]) for having wrongly concluded that such cases show that the first-person pronoun "I" does not refer to anything.
Language issues
In the last third of the book Evans turns to problems with reference to objects that actively depend on the use of language. Here he treats the use of proper names, which do not seem to presuppose as much knowledge on the part of the speaker as demonstrative or recognition-based identification. One can refer to an object one has never encountered using a name if the name was received in the right sort of linguistic (social) practice—even, apparently, if one has no true beliefs about the object. He also considers problems of reference to objects in fictions and hallucinations, and to the meaning of saying that something exists which doesn't. (Here he draws explicitly on Kripke's never-published John Locke lecturesJohn Locke lectures
The John Locke Lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. They are one of the world's most prestigious academic lecture series, comparable to the Gifford Lectures given in Scottish universities...
, Reference and Existence).
Selected publications
- 1973, "The Causal Theory of Names," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume xlvii, pp. 187–208.
- 1975, "Identity and Predication," Journal of Philosophy lxxii, pp. 343–363.
- 1976(a), Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics (co-edited with John McDowell), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 1976(b), "Semantic Structure and Logical Form," in Evans and McDowell (eds.) 1976(a), pp. 199–222.
- 1977, "Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses" (I), Canadian Journal of Philosophy vii, pp. 467–536.
- 1978, "Can There Be Vague Objects?" Analysis Vol. 38, No. 4, p. 208.
- 1979, "Reference and Contingency," The Monist lxii, pp. 161–189.
- 1980, "Pronouns," Linguistic Inquiry xi, pp. 337–362.
- 1980, "Things Without the Mind," in Zak van Staaten (ed.) Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P.F. Strawson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 76–116.
- 1981, "Understanding Demonstratives," in Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse (eds.) Meaning and Understanding, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, pp. 280–303.
- 1982, The Varieties of Reference (published posthumously, edited by John McDowell), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 1985, Collected Papers, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Resources
- Rick Grush's Guide to Gareth Evans's Varieties of Reference.
- Andrea Sauchelli's Blog on Evans.