Misplaced Modification and the Illusion of Opacity

In a number of groundbreaking publications, John Perry has stressed the importance of avoiding a class of fallacies that he and Barwise (1983) formerly called Fallacies of Misplaced Information and that Perry (2001) now prefers to call subject matter fallacies. One commits a subject matter fallacy when one supposes that: …the content of a statement or belief is wholly constituted by the conditions its truth puts on the subject matter of the statement or belief; that is, the conditions it puts on the objects the words designate or the ideas are of. (Perry 2001) Avoiding the bewitching influence of subject matter fallacies, Perry has argued, is one key to seeing that two alleged failures of referentialism-viz., its apparent inability to solve both what Perry calls the co-reference problem and what he calls the no-reference problem-are really only apparent. The co-reference problem is the problem of explaining how possibly, consistent with referentialism, co-referring expressions may differ in cognitive significance. The no reference problem is the problem of explaining how possibly, consistent with referentialism, names entirely lacking a referent may be cognitively significant at all. Naïve forms of referentialism maintain that all there is to the meaning, semantic content, or cognitive significance of a name is its property of standing for a certain 2 object. Referentialism of this sort has a prima facie problem on each of these fronts. The naïve referentialist would seem to be committed to saying that sentences differing only by co-referring names must have the same cognitive significance and that sentence containing names with no reference must be entirely devoid of cognitive significance. By distinguishing what he calls referential content from what he calls reflexive content, Perry insists that the referentialist can offer satisfying solutions to both the co-reference and no reference problems. The reflexive content of an utterance is, roughly, a proposition about that very utterance and the conditions under which it is true. The referential content of an utterance, on the other hand, is typically a proposition about some object-the object that is the subject matter of the relevant utterance. Armed with this distinction, the referentialist can claim that even if there is no difference in referential or subject matter content between two sentences that differ only by the presence of co-referring names, there can still be differences in the reflexive contents of such utterances. And the crucial further claim is that although what is said …