That’s mine, I believe! The success semantics of ownership judgments

Luca Tummolini (Institute of Philosophy, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)

Abstract:

Suppose that Rogers is out for a hunt. He is on an abandoned beach and has a fox in his gun-sight. Suddenly, Thomas appears, kills the fox, and runs away with the carcass. Feeling that he has been robbed of something that was already his, Rogers sues Thomas for the value of the fox. The court, however, disagrees with Rogers and judges that, since Thomas has been the one who killed the animal, he was the one to possess it first. Being the first to possess the carcass gives Thomas a claim to its ownership. Thus, Thomas, and not Rogers, is the owner of the fox (See the famous legal case of Pierson v Post, 1805). Is the court’s judgment or belief true? If it is true, what kind of fact makes an ownership judgment true? Is there such thing as a fact involving ownership? In this talk, I will approach this problem not from the perspective of metaphysics but from that of semantics, and, in particular, that of success semantics (Whyte 1990, 1991). To adopt Frank Ramsey’s metaphor, ownership beliefs, like every belief about social facts, are considered as the maps of a social space by which we steer that, when true, always lead to success. If there is a connection between truth and successful action, then such connection is there also when we act on the basis of beliefs about social reality.