Saturday, March 31, 2007

singular thoughts and agnosticism

In his book "Basic Christianity", John Stott offers a prayer for someone who is interested in investigating the claims of Christ in the gospels (e.g. The Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of John) that he or she can pray before reading:


'God, if you exist (and I don't know if you do), and if you can hear this prayer (and I don't know if you can), I want to tell you that I am an honest seeker after the truth. Show me if Jesus is your Son and the Saviour of the world. And if you bring conviction to my mind, I will trust him as my Saviour and follow him as my Lord.'


The prayer seems to suggest that one can have singular thoughts about objects one is not sure exist. This sounds a bit strange. What would be the semantic values of 'God' and 'you' in such a situation?

I'm inclined to think that in situations like this, one could not have a singular thought. This appears to include the assumption that the epistemic state of the thinker is relevant for having a singular thought. However, I'm not particularly sold on the idea that one needs to stand in some sort of acquaintance relation with an object in order to have a singular thought. For example, if my friend tells me,

(1) 'Jones will be coming to the party',

then, it seems perfectly reasonable to think that I can utter a sentence that expresses a singular thought about Jones,

e.g. (2) 'Matt said that Jones is coming to the party. Since he's not here yet, he must be caught in traffic.'

Even though I'm not acquainted with Jones, this utterance still expresses a singular thought, so it seems to me.

I don't have anything else to say about this at the moment...

**Update--Jason Stanley (J to the izzo) suggested a way to think about this case. The deal is that the agnostic, though not grasping the proposition, nevertheless expresses a singular thought. Something like this seems to be what's going on in (2) above.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home