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A Puzzle about Belief
Abstract
In this paper I will present a puzzle about names and belief.A moral or two will be drawn about some other arguments that
have occasionallly been advanced in this area, but my main thesis is a simple one : that the puzzle is a puzzle. And, as a
corollary, that any account of belief must ultimately come to grips with it. Any speculation as to solutions can be deferred.
The first section of the paper gives the theortical background in previous discussion, and in my own earlier work, that led
me to consider the puzzle. The background is by no means necessary to state the puzzle: As a philosophical puzzle, it stands on its own, and I think its fundamental interest for the problem of belief
goes beyond the background that engendered it.As I indicate in the third section, the problem really goes beyond beliefs expressed
using names, to a far wider class of beliefs. Nevertheless, I think that the background illuminates the genesis of the puzzle,
and it will enable me to draw one moral in the concluding section.
The second section states some general principles which underlie our general practice of reporting beliefs.These principles
are state in much more detail than in needed to comprehend the puzzle; and there are variant formulations of the principles
that would do as well.Neither this section nor the first necessary for an intuitive grasp of the central problem, discussed
in the third section, though they may help with fine points of the discussion. The reader who wishes rapid access to the central
problem could skim the first two sections lightly on a first reading.
... In the article, we will propose an historical causal-chain theory of conceptions of intelligence, basing our theory on the philosophical work on meaning, especially of proper names, done by Donnellan (1972), Evans and Altham (1973), Kripke (1979Kripke ( , 1980, Putnam (1973Putnam ( , 1983, and others. The basic idea of this theory is that meaning inheres not in sets of features or prototypes, but rather in an historical causal chain that works its way through the history of a concept. ...
... As Danziger (1990Danziger ( , 1997Danziger ( , 2013 has pointed out, all psychological concepts are embedded in networks of concepts whose meanings shift and evolve over the course of time. Danziger's notion seems generally consistent with the historical causal-chain theory, as proposed earlier by Donnellan (1972), Evans and Altham (1973), Kripke (1979Kripke ( , 1980 and Putnam (1973Putnam ( , 1983, among others. ...
... Our development as human beings exemplifies the historical causal-chain theory of meaning, sometimes simply called the causal theory or the historical theory of meaning, as proposed by Saul Kripke (1979Kripke ( , 1980 and Hilary Putnam (1973Putnam ( , 1983, among others. The theory is often applied to proper names. ...
Lurking behind every conception of intelligence—whether an implicit (folk) or explicit (expert-generated) conception—is an underlying theory of meaning that specifies the form the theory of intelligence does and, indeed, can take. These underlying theories of meaning become presuppositions for the conception’s form. The theories of meaning have different origins—for example, psycholinguistic, philosophical, and anthropological. This essay reviews the different underlying theories of meaning and proposes a new historical causal-chain theory of conceptions of intelligence. The underlying theories of meaning affect the flexibility and modifiability of laypersons’ (implicit) and experts’ (explicit) conceptions of intelligence. As a result, these historical causal chains have profound but largely invisible effects on societies.
... A normal speaker of a language L is a speaker who with their utterances of a standard sentence S of L expresses exactly the very proposition S is normally used to express in L (see, e.g., Kripke 1979, 439, Salmon 2011. The clauses that the speaker utters the sentence sincerely and on reflection should exclude that the speaker is acting, lying, using irony, or suffering a conceptual confusion. ...
... For example, following Evans (1982Evans ( , 1985 and McDowell (1977McDowell ( , 1984, Recanati (2012) (Kripke 1980, 83-4), according to Recanati (2012, 34- In this way, Neo-Fregeans can solve Frege's puzzle by replacing the theory of direct reference (DR N ) with the Fregean thesis that the propositional content of a token r of a name n is a way the referent of r of n is presented to the speaker, while blocking Kripke's arguments against the description theory of proper names. However, Kripke (1979) could further exacerbate Frege's puzzle. Thus, Kripke could show that the disquotational principle (P DP ) and the rationality principle (P RP ) already lead to contradictions together with our everyday translation practice and the following simple translation principle. ...
... However, despite its early promise, the distinction has fallen out of favour in the philosophy of language since the 1970s. One reason is that Frege puzzles analogous to that of 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' were shown to arise even for pairs of clearly synonymous terms, such as 'London' and 'Londres' or 'furze' and 'gorse' (Kripke 1979). Neo-Fregeans proposed that differences in sense can cut finer than differences in linguistic meaning for a given speaker, but if no two words can have the same sense, then the posited difference of sense becomes redundant; the difference of word will already do the work. ...
... They can be understood as heuristics for truth and falsity. Again, Kripke's puzzle about belief can be read, against his intentions, as showing how Frege puzzles for belief like 'Hesperus'/'Phosphorus' depend on heuristics for determining what people believe from their linguistic behaviour (Kripke 1979). Heuristics for ascribing knowledge and belief can in turn cast light on the nature of knowledge and belief themselves. ...
Metaphilosophy is defined as philosophical reflection on philosophy itself, and so is part of philosophy. If one lacks the category of philosophy, one can still do philosophy, but one may not be in a position to do metaphilosophy. Cases are discussed of tension between a philosopher’s metaphilosophical theory and their philosophical practice, in epistemology (scepticism), metaphysics (ontological minimalism), and philosophy of language (verificationism and intensionalism). Such tensions often provoke charges of self–defeat. However, the self–defeat turns out to be just one more manifestation of more general inadequacies in the philosophical theory at issue. The epistemology of philosophy is just an application of general epistemology; the philosophy of philosophical language is just an application of general philosophy of language, and so on. These considerations are used to support anti–exceptionalism about philosophy: philosophical thought and talk are much less different from other thought and talk than many philosophers suppose. The second half of the paper describes the author’s own experience of the complex dialectic between metaphilosophy and more general philosophy, in which metaphilosophical disputes about specific aspects of philosophical practice draw attention to more general cognitive phenomena, which require to be understood philosophically, but may also call for revisions of philosophical practice in metaphilosophically significant ways.
... What we have in common, though, is that in order to account for the way accommodation is carried out we both add an additional layer to a type theory based semantics and talk in procedural terms of actions to be carried out: we with our action rules and de Groote and Lebedeva with their error handling mechanism. Kripke (1979) discusses the case of Peter who hears about a pianist called Paderewski. Later, in a different context, he learns of a Polish national leader and Prime Minister called Paderewski. ...
... One can understand, however, why the idea of a single referent for a proper name in a single microlanguage might seem attractive. When Kripke (1979) introduces the puzzle about Peter and Paderewski he is careful to point out the circumstances under which Peter came to the conclusion that there were two Paderewskis. Peter first learns the name Paderewski in connection with the famous pianist. ...
The aim of this book is to characterize a notion of type which will cover both linguistic and non-linguistic action and to lay the foundations for a theory of action based on a theory of types called TTR (a Theory of Types with Records). The book argues that a theory of language based on action allows us to take a perspective on linguistic content which is centred on interaction in dialogue and that this is importantly different to the traditional view of natural languages as being essentially similar to formal languages such as logics developed by philosophers or mathematicians. At the same time it will argue that the tremendous technical advances made by the formal language view of semantics can be incorporated into the action-based view and that this can lead to important improvements both of intuitive understanding and empirical coverage. In this enterprise we use types rather than possible worlds as commonly employed in studies of the semantics of natural language. Types are more tractable than possible worlds and give us more hope of understanding the implementation of semantics both on machines and in biological brains.
... To repeat a recurring theme, the Concept Referentialist needs to be able to gesture to relevant differences; they do not need to be able to clean up these resources into robust identity conditions for concepts. 35 Since Kripke (1979), it has been standard to distinguish cases involving seemingly inconsistent beliefs (Paderewski believes that Paris is beautiful and also believes that Paris is not beautiful) and those involving seemingly incompatible belief reports (Paderewski believes that Paris is beautiful but also does not believe that Paris is beautiful). In broad outline, the present approach to FPP deals with the former kind of case by explaining the putative inconsistency and it deals with the latter by explaining the claims of nonbelief in terms of the agent not believing various tokens of the relevant type of thought. ...
The main goal of this paper is to defend so-called atomist approaches to concept individuation against the threat presented by what I will refer to as Frege’s Problem Psychologized (FPP): difficulties presented by putative cases of co-referring but distinct concepts. The discussion will provide an opportunity to highlight the virtues of a particularly austere, reference-based version of Concept Atomism and to draw attention to some broader morals, notably that even a radical version of atomism is consistent with embracing various features of cognition that are of interest to psychologists and empirically oriented philosophers.
... It's easy to see why these multiple modes of reference are troubling for traditional semantics: if Superman = s and Clark Kent = Superman , then we should be able to substitute Clark Kent for Superman and vice-versa salva veritate. Problems of this sort have been well-known since Frege (1892) and were later expanded on by Kripke (1979) and various solutions have been proposed to aspects of the problem (e.g. Aloni's Conceptual Covers). ...
Both individuals and predicates can be referred to in different ways which carry different senses or connotations. Despite this being discussed since at least Frege, it poses a deep problem to standard extensional semantics. For example, as discussed by Jennifer Saul, “Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Superman came out” simply means something different from “Superman went into the phone booth and Clark Kent came out”. I introduce a novel way of modelling these kinds of semantic phenomena using Sampling Propensity (Icard, 2016). The core idea is that the basic atoms of semantic calculus are generated from a set of potential candidates via a generative cognitive procedure. In other words, when one thinks of Clark Kent, they directly think of someone wearing glasses or being a mild-mannered journalist, whereas Superman draws to mind blue-and-red leotards and heroics. This sampling procedure is also at play with common nouns in generic sentences like “lions have manes” or “mosquitoes carry malaria”. Crucially, it can distinguish co-extensional nouns like “drink” and “beverage”, which occasionally yield different truth conditions in the same kinds of generic sentences. The account includes a fully-formalised compositional system in which individual concepts and category concepts are modeled as an extension linked with a sampling propensity and where some propositions are evaluated by continually sampling exemplars from a concept. The sampling approach also links competence and performance where finite sampling yields performance and sampling repeatedly converges on competence. This approach also has ramifications for quantification, particularly the generic “flavour” of non-partitive ‘all’.
... We can also conceive of something under false and even contradictory descriptions, such as Pierre does when he thinks of London. SeeKripke [1979]. ...
Vaidya and Wallner [2021] claim that most relevant theories in recent epistemology of modality, that is, Conceivability-Theory, Counterfactual-Theory, and Deduction-Theory, face what they name “the problem of modal epistemic friction”, in a nutshell, the need to add some relevant information about the nature of the world that is not provided by the theories as such. Their proposal is that essences supply the needed information. In this paper I will agree with Vaidya and Waller’s detection of the problem of modal epistemic friction, but I will importantly disagree with their solution in terms of a metaphysics and epistemology of essences. I will argue that knowledge of essence is neither necessary nor sufficient for metaphysical modal knowledge and claim instead that modal knowledge is firstly grounded in the categories that conform the facts of reality. Categorial knowledge does the job of creating the friction needed in all cases of modal metaphysical knowledge.Moreover, given the structural character of metaphysical categories, intuition is the basic proper form of modal knowledge. In fact, I will contend that intuition is the source of a priori knowledge invoked in Kripkean schemas for a posteriori modal truths.
... Nonetheless, the above description can be seen as open to various interpretations, allowing for accounts differing at epistemic and ontological levels. For example, the direct referentialist positions of [64,65], [60][61][62] or [77] are theories of language claiming that the meaning of words and expressions lie in what they point out in the world. Because of that, a relationship between world and language must exist. ...
The nature of information security has been, and probably will continue to be, marked by the asymmetric competition of attackers and defenders over the control of an uncertain environment. The reduction of this degree of uncertainty via an increase in understanding of that environment is a primary objective for both sides. Models are useful tools in this context because they provide a way to understand and experiment with their targets without the usual operational constraints. However, given the technological and social advancements of today, the object of modelling has increased in complexity. Such objects are no longer singular entities, but heterogeneous socio-technical systems interlinked to form large-scale ecosystems. Furthermore, the underlying components of a system might be based on very different epistemic assumptions and methodologies for construction and use. Naturally, consistent, rigorous reasoning about such systems is hard, but necessary for achieving both security and resilience. The goal of this paper is to present a modelling approach tailored for heterogeneous systems based on three elements: an inferentialist interpretation of what a model is, a distributed systems metaphor to structure that interpretation and a co-design cycle to describe the practical design and construction of the model. The underlying idea is that an open world interpretation, supported by a formal, yet generic abstraction facilitating knowledge translation and providing properties for structured reasoning and, used in practice according to the co-design cycle could lead to models that are more likely to achieve their pre-stated goals. We explore the suitability of this method in the context of three different security-oriented models: a physical data loss model, an organisational recovery under ransomware model and an surge capacity trauma unit model.
... CompareKripke (1979), at pp. 253-254. ...
Alonzo Church proposed a powerful and elegant theory of sequences of functions and their arguments as surrogates for Russellian singular propositions and singular concepts. Church’s proposed theory accords with his Alternative (0), the strictest of his three competing criteria for strict synonymy. The currently popular objection to strict criteria like (0) on the basis of the Russell–Myhill antinomy is here rebutted. Russell–Myhill is not a problem specifically for Alternative (0); it is a refutation of unrestrained concept comprehension. Unrestricted comprehension is also inconsistent with facts about sets of properties. Criteria more lax than (0) are philosophically inadequate. In particular, the rival conception of propositions as classes of possible worlds is subject to a fatal philosophical collapse. It follows on that conception, given that each of us is fallible, that everyone believes everything. It is shown, however, that Church’s proposed theory is vulnerable under (0) to a version of Russell’s notorious Gray’s Elegy objection. Some amendments to Church’s proposal are proffered, including an amendment, first proposed in the author’s Frege’s Puzzle (1986), that addresses Russell’s objection. Church’s response (personal correspondence) is considered.
... The probabilistic paradoxes are akin to the triviality results, due to Lewis (1976) and Hajek (1989), and others, which hit the hypothesis that the probability of an indicative amounts to the probability of the consequent conditional on the antecedent. Carnap (1947)'s idea of an intensional isomorphism, has to do with contexts created by attitude ascriptions: we seem to sometimes truthfully say that one has an attitude towards the proposition that ϕ without having it towards an intensionally equivalent ψ: John Doe may believe that 2 + 2 = 4 without believing Fermat's Last Theorem, etc. But, Williamson claims, Kripke (1979)'s Pierre puzzle should have alerted us to the possibility that our attitude ascriptions are also guided by heuristics which turn out to be occasionally inconsistent: [Kripke] plausibly suggests that English speakers rely on something like the schema "A normal English speaker who is not reticent will be disposed to sincere reflective assent to 'p' if and only if he believes that p". Plausibly, users of other natural languages rely on analogous schemata. ...
A hyperintensional epistemic logic would take the contents which can be known or believed as more fine-grained than sets of possible worlds. I consider one objection to the idea: Williamson’s Objection from Overfitting. I propose a hyperintensional account of propositions as sets of worlds enriched with topics: what those propositions, and so the attitudes having them as contents, are about. I show that the account captures the conditions under which sentences express the same content; that it can be pervasively applied in formal and mainstream epistemology; and that it is left unscathed by the objection.
... Here α, β, and φ it are again as before, and φ β is the same as φ it except for having occurrences of β wherever φ it has free occurrences of the relevant pronoun. 8 FollowingKripke (1979), in Rinner (2022) I make the disquotational principles used by Schiffer explicit: ...
Using a variant of Schiffer’s puzzle regarding de re belief, I recently presented a new argument against the so-called Naive Russellian theory, consisting of the following theses: () The propositions we say and believe are Russellian propositions, i.e., structured propositions consisting of the objects, properties, and relations our thoughts and speech acts are about; () Names (and other singular terms) are directly referential terms, i.e., the propositional content of a name is just its referent; () A sentence of the form ‘A believes/disbelieves that S’ is true in a context c if and only if the referent of A in c believes/disbelieves the proposition expressed by S in c. In this paper, I will argue that my variant of Schiffer’s puzzle is not only a problem for the Naive Russellian theory, but for every theory of belief ascriptions entailing (). Such theories are also called relational analyses of belief ascriptions. Here the main alternative to a Neo-Russellian theory, consisting of () and (), is a Fregean theory, according to which the propositions we say and believe are Fregean propositions, i.e., structured propositions consisting of ways the objects, properties, and relations our thoughts and speech acts are about are presented to the speaker or agent. I will argue that such variants of the relational analysis are committed to principles very similar to the principles used by my Schiffer puzzle. Concluding, I will discuss Fregean and Neo-Russellian alternatives to the relational analysis, and I will argue that, although there are Neo-Russellian alternatives to the relational analysis which provide a solution to my variant of Schiffer’s puzzle, there seem to be no such Fregean alternatives.
... Opacity may arise with the choice of one term over a different, coreferential one, but it may also arise with a particular use of the same coreferential name and with different coreferential uses of a pronoun, so that substitution itself won't make a difference. Relevant cases are familiar from the philosophical literature (Kripke's 1979 Paderewski case, Crimmins and Perry's 1989 phone-booth case). In all cases of substitutional or referential opacity, what is commonly considered a 'mode of presentation' associated with a name or use of a name or pronoun is part of the content of a described attitude and bears on the overall truth conditions of the attitude report. ...
This is a prepublication version of my book Objects and Attitudes, Oxford University Press 2024 (ebook), 2025 (paper) (please cite the published version!). The book develops a novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, reports of saying, and quotation based on the view that sentences semantically act as predicates of various attitudinal and modal objects or satisfiables, entities like claims, requests, promises, obligations, and permissions, rather than standing for abstract propositions playing the role of objects. Modal and attitudinal objects are sharply distinguished ontologically from events, acts, and states. The book presents a wide range of applications of the view to issues in semantics, syntax, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In particular, it gives a new development of truthmaker semantics, as a semantics applied to attitudinal and modal objects ('object-based-truthmaker semantics'). The ontology of satisfiables in fact provides specific novel motivations for truthmaker semantics. For the semantics of reports of saying and quotation the book makes novel use of an 'Austinian' ontology of phatic and locutionary objects, allowing for a new, compositional semantics of quotation.
... I might say 'Pierre thinks London is pretty' even if Pierre doesn't know what 'pretty' means (cf. Kripke 1979). Moreover, we can ascribe beliefs to non-linguistic creatures. ...
I develop an expressivist account of verbal disagreements as practical disagreements over how to use words rather than factual disagreements over what words actually mean. This account enjoys several advantages over others in the literature: it can be implemented in a neo-Stalnakerian possible worlds framework; it accounts for cases where speakers are undecided on how exactly to interpret an expression; it avoids appeals to fraught notions like subject matter, charitable interpretation, and joint-carving; and it naturally extends to an analysis of metalinguistic negotiations.
... This leaves us in need of an alternative explanation of how names get their referents. For the causal theorist, this explanation runs not in terms of their meaning, but rather in terms of their use: when we reflect on our practice of using names, we quickly recognize that people introduce names by tagging 1. Kripke's commitment to Millianism in his 1972 is also notoriously questionable (though see his reflective comments in Kripke 1979). And recently some have argued that Donnellan rejected Causation outright (cf. ...
Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect.
... For defences of Millian views of names, see inter alia,Marcus (1961),Kripke (1979Kripke ( , 1980,Salmon (1986), andSoames (2002). ...
Iako metafizika riječi ostaje relativno nedovoljno proučavano područje, jedna od tema o kojoj se više raspravlja bilo je pitanje kako objasniti prividnu istovjetnost riječi. Jednostavnije rečeno, pitanje se odnosi na to što dvije riječi-instance (ili primjerci) čini instancama iste riječi. U ovom radu tvrdim da sva postojeća rješenja problema nisu uspješna jer problem istovjetnosti riječi smatraju problemom odnosa jednog predmeta prema drugom. Predlažem alternativno rješenje problema istovjetnosti riječi koje je umjesto toga usredotočeno na intrinzičnu prirodu svojstava koja posjeduju riječi. Rezultat je temeljitija verzija nominalizma nego što trenutno postoji u literaturi.
This chapter pursues two goals: firstly, to throw light both on the role of notional objects in thought economy and on how they are integrated in it; and secondly, the question whether notional objects do exist and, were they to exist, what kind of existence they would have. In the first part of chapter, the question to be dealt with is how notional objects become denizens of the agents’ thoughts and referential values of their languages’ language-to-world system. The focal point will be the question of how the experiences of those agents, as long as each is hooked to a specific world-situation or a life-trajectory, result in a coherent discourse. The indexical theory of proper names plays a central role in answering the question. The second part of the chapter aims to explain intentional objects’ mode of existence and what separates it from the one had by notional objects. To achieve it, I will lean on a few of Roman Ingarden’s ideas. I will hold that notional objects are intentional objects, though not merely intentional objects.
This book is intended as a definitive guide to contemporary philosophy of language but with a twist: although some of the articles focus on technical issues more narrowly construed in the recent tradition of linguistically oriented philosophy of language, the majority focus on foundational questions in traditional philosophy of language. The aim is to reconsider these foundational issues in a new light, while still bearing in mind the formal developments in recent literature, as well as to present foundational issues that have emerged on account of such developments. Virtually all our contributors are philosophers of language. So, the aim of the volume is to urge a return to, and a reconsideration of, the basic, foundational issues in the philosophy of language. The book divides into seven general parts: I, Languages and Language; II, Semantic Content and Propositional Attitudes; III, Communication and Speech Acts; IV, Meta-Semantics and Foundations of Meaning Theory; V, Tense and Modality; VI, Semantics and Linguistic Theory; and VII, Expressive, Evaluative, Subjective, and Social Aspects of Language. The contributions provide a lay-of-the-land of current research trends, presenting cutting-edge developments on the most fundamental issues in the philosophy of language, from the nature of language; to the nature of semantic and attitudinal content; to the dynamics of communication; to speech acts; to meta-semantics and reference grounding; to tense and modality; to discourse dynamics, and information structure; to the expressive, evaluative, subjective, and social aspects of language. The book will thus be of interest to active researchers in the field and novices alike.
This paper offers a critical analysis of Ding and Liu’s (2022) contribution to the ongoing debate stemming from Machery et al.’s (2004) experimental investigation of Kripke’s Gödel Case. Machery et al. test referential intuitions on proper names among laypeople from American and Chinese backgrounds and contend that their results challenge Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism. Ding and Liu argue that descriptions in Gödel-style scenarios are ambiguous between a brute-fact and a social-fact interpretation, and Machery et al. overlook the latter. Building upon this ambiguity, Ding and Liu conduct several studies, maintaining that the results reveal that Machery et al. misclassify some descriptivist answers as causal-historical. If that is the case, the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism is even more substantial than Machery et al. claim. In this paper, I argue that, even granting some specific points that Ding and Liu endorse, their main experiment (Study 3) fails to provide the intended evidence. Despite the authors’ attempted rejoinders, the social-fact interpretation of the description in the Gödel Case is either circular or implicitly presupposes a referential role for the name’s causal-historical chain. Hence, in contrast to Ding and Liu’s interpretation, from their premises, they can only conclude that their main experiment’s results do not bolster Machery et al.’s (2004) challenge against Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism, but rather diminish it.
A new argument is offered which proceeds through epistemic possibility (for all S knows, p), cutting a trail from modality to Millianism, the controversial thesis that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its bearer. New definitions are provided for various epistemic modal notions. A surprising theorem about epistemic necessity is proved. A proposition p can be epistemically necessary for a knowing subject S even though p is a posteriori and S does not know p. The identity relation is well‐behaved in metaphysically possible worlds but can go rogue in epistemically possible worlds. Whereas it can be epistemically possible that Lewis Carroll is not Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, this is not epistemically possible in the manner that anti‐Millianism requires.
La célebre metáfora del molino de Leibniz planteó un problema que mucho después Levine denominó “brecha explicativa”, en referencia a la disyunción aparente entre los aspectos mentales y materiales de la realidad. El monismo neutral, a este respecto, se revela como un digno rival del monismo materialista, aceptando la subjetividad irreductible de los qualia. Esta tesis separa en cierto modo la psicología de la física y, si a ella unimos una hipótesis adicional, destierra la posibilidad de máquinas pensantes.
Russellianism is the view that the meaning of a proper name is the individual designated by the name. Together with other plausible assumptions, Russellianism entails the following: Sentences containing proper names express Russellian propositions, which involve the individual designated by the name as a direct constituent, and which can be represented as sets of individuals and properties. Moreover, as they occur in ordinary belief reports, ‘that’-clauses designate Russellian propositions. Such belief reports are true if and only if the subject of the belief report bears the belief relation to the proposition designated by the ‘that’-clause. In defending this doctrine, some Russellians appeal to propositional guises, which, roughly speaking, are ways of grasping propositions. However, some Russellians don’t appeal to such entities. In this paper, I explain the varieties of Russellianism and then argue for Modest Russellianism: Believing a Russellian proposition is essentially mediated by guises, so that an agent can’t believe a Russellian proposition without standing in some appropriate relation to both the proposition and a guise. Nonetheless, guises don’t feature in the semantics of ordinary belief reports, so that an adequate account of the meaning of such belief reports needn’t invoke guises.
In his (Philosophical Perspectives 1:455–480, 1987) and (Noûs, 40:361–368, 2006), Schiffer devised a puzzle about Salmón’s (in: Frege’s puzzle, MIT Press, 1986a) Millian-Russellian theory of belief reports, which Salmón resolved in his (Philosophical Perspectives 3:243–285, 1989) and (Noûs, 40:369–375, 2006). My paper has three objectives. First, I will argue that the strategy employed by Salmón (in: Noûs 40:369–375, 2006) to solve Schiffer’s puzzle and his argument for such a strategy are disputable. Second, I will raise a new puzzle, inspired by ideas from Saul (in: Analysis 57:102–108, 1997) and Braun and Saul (in: Philos Stud 111:1–41, 2002), which achieves similar results to Schiffer’s puzzle but to which Salmón’s overall strategy for resolving the latter does not apply. Third, I will contend that the import of both puzzles is neither what Salmón maintains nor the alleged inadequacy of the Millian-Russellian semantics of belief reports as Schiffer suggests, but is the failure of Frege’s Constraint—a constraint to which several conceptions of modes of presentation, including Salmón’s (in: Frege’s puzzle, MIT Press, 1986a) in terms of guises and Schiffer’s (in: The things we mean, Oxford University Press, 2003) in terms of unstructured and fine-grained concepts/propositions, are committed.
This article argues that heuristics play a key role in philosophy, in generating both our verdicts on proposed counterexamples to philosophical theories and philosophical paradoxes. Heuristics are efficient ways of answering questions, quick and easy to use, but imperfectly reliable. They have been studied by psychologists and cognitive scientists such as Gigerenzer and Kahneman, but their relevance to philosophical methodology has not been properly recognized. Several heuristics are discussed at length. The persistence heuristic can be summarized in the slogan ‘Small changes don’t matter’. Without it, updating would present an intractable problem for both natural and artificial intelligence. But our reliance on the persistence heuristic also makes us vulnerable to paradoxes of vagueness. Disquotational heuristics of various kinds are considered. They play central roles in our ascriptions of truth, falsity, and belief, but they also generate semantic paradoxes such as the Liar and Frege puzzles about coreference. The use of an additive heuristic for combining reasons is also discussed. Our reliance on fallible heuristics in philosophy does not make philosophical knowledge impossible, just as our reliance on fallible heuristics in perception does not make perceptual knowledge impossible. Nevertheless, it should motivate us to take a more critical attitude to our data. By identifying and analyzing the heuristics on which we rely, we may be able to work out where they make us most vulnerable to error.
The ‘Only connect!’ that serves as epigraph to Forster's Howards End tolerates a variety of interpretations; but the very idea of a connection , or a relating of one thing with another, is conceptually deep. One form of connection is when something is about a thing, representing or symbolizing that thing. When we think of someone, or discuss something, we connect to them, or to it.
In his Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein asks, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him ? […] Isn't my question like this : “What makes this sentence a sentence that has to do with him ?”’ Wittgenstein thus notes the ramifications of his question: what makes her name hers? In virtue of what is this thought about them a thought about them? The issue he highlights has been with us since Plato's Cratylus and its history is unified by a presupposition: whatever makes it that (i) a bit of language (like a name or a sentence or any linguistic symbol) is about something is, fundamentally, also what makes it that (ii) a thought (or idea or image) is about a thing. The story of aboutness will be uniform , simplex, or so the presupposition has it.
But the history of the issue has been one of failure: we still don't adequately understand the nature of representation. I will propose and develop a perspective that rejects the presupposition and explains the failure: there is more than one way for a thing to be about something. Representation comes, ultimately, in varieties.
Přijetí teze, že některé výrazy referují bez zprostředkování identifikujícími podmínkami přímo k objektům, vede k několika problematickým důsledkům týkajícím se propozičních postojů. Jedním z těchto důsledků je ten, že bychom tudíž na základě přesvědčení Lois Lanové, že Superman je silnější než Clark Kent, byli nuceni uznat, že je též přesvědčena o existenci někoho, kdo má tu vlastnost, že je silnější, než skutečně je. Snad žádný racionálně uvažující člověk by však zřejmě přesvědčení o existenci někoho, o kom by tato nemožná vlastnost měla platit, nepřijal. Klíčovým pojmem, na němž platnost vyvození tohoto přesvědčení stojí, je reflexivita – ze zjevně nereflexivního obsahu přesvědčení se vyvozuje přesvědčení reflexivní. Příspěvek se pokouší odhalit, kam je možno reflexivitu v rámci informačního obsahu věty zasadit. Zváženy jsou nejprve dvě možnosti: reflexivita je buď sémantickou vlastností vztahů, nebo anaforických zájmen. Obě možnosti budou vyvráceny prostřednictvím argumentace, že ve větách popisujících vztah mezi obsahy dvou koreferujících singulárních termínů nemůže být reflexivita součástí sémantické informace, jelikož znalost identity reference není podmínkou sémantické kompetence. Reflexivita je u těchto typů vět vázána na koordinaci znalostí mezi mluvčími. Jsou formulovány nutné podmínky, které by platnost daného vyvození teprve ospravedlnily.
– Le présent article esquisse un modèle cognitif de « l’intuition de différence » entre le phénoménal et le physique. Mettant à profit un modèle élaboré conjointement par des philosophes et chercheurs en sciences cognitives, celui des « fichiers mentaux », qui décrit la manière dont l’esprit représente les individus et leur identité, nous défendons la thèse selon laquelle l’intuition s’explique par l’impossibilité de lier des « fichiers matériels » à des « fichiers phénoménaux ». Ces derniers représentent les expériences à travers des relations « d’accointance forte », et obéissent à une contrainte de « super-transparence ». Nous nous efforçons de répondre aux objections que ce modèle soulève, en nous inspirant des recherches récentes sur les fichiers mentaux.
The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the use of higher-order logics in metaphysics. Characteristic of this trend is the use of higher-order languages to formulate metaphysical views and arguments. We call such uses of higher-order logic in metaphysics “higher-order metaphysics”. Often, higher-order quantifiers are used to formalize talk of propositions, properties and relations. This is the first volume of papers on this field, comprising 17 new essays by many of the leading contributors. The articles in this volume introduce and motivate higher-order metaphysics, discuss different choices of higher-order languages and logics, apply higher-order logic to a number of central metaphysical topics, discuss the history of higher-order logic in metaphysics, and debate the arguments for and against using higher-order logic in metaphysics.
The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the use of higher-order logics in metaphysics. Characteristic of this trend is the use of higher-order languages to formulate metaphysical views and arguments. We call such uses of higher-order logic in metaphysics “higher-order metaphysics”. Often, higher-order quantifiers are used to formalize talk of propositions, properties and relations. This is the first volume of papers on this field, comprising 17 new essays by many of the leading contributors. The articles in this volume introduce and motivate higher-order metaphysics, discuss different choices of higher-order languages and logics, apply higher-order logic to a number of central metaphysical topics, discuss the history of higher-order logic in metaphysics, and debate the arguments for and against using higher-order logic in metaphysics.
I present a novel account of unconditional obligation and of its relationship to conditional obligation and bring this account to bear upon Chisholm's puzzle concerning contrary-to duty obligation.
The article critiques the meaningfulness of Sukuma cow names as the answer to theoretical contribution within the frameworks of linguists and philosophy in assessing the semantics of cattle names. The exertion used Descriptive, Indirect Reference, and Onomastics Theories. The former describes names as identical to the objects’ descriptions; the latter indicates that names are more than simply the object to which they refer. The last refers to the theory, which shows the origin of names they came from. The study used structured interviews with 4 sukuma speakers from Mwamashimba village of Tanzania who were selected purposively via snowballing technique. It was found that Lunya, Nyankole, Mabhú, Mkala, and Shilungu are Sukuma cow names whose meaning is meaningless as they have no symbiotic relations with the semantic content, they refer to rather than just labelling of objects, places, colour, and structure. Based on the findings, it was concluded that Sukuma cow names are meaningless and not rigid designators as claimed in the philosophy of language rather than identification labels, which are very important in any speech community in stirring emotion, cultural awareness as well and historical connection between the present and the past.
The phenomenon of ‘structural irrationality’ covers a diverse range of combinations of attitudes, including (inter alia) contradictory beliefs, contradictory intentions, means–end incoherence, akratic incoherence, and cyclical preferences. This paper offers a novel, unified account of when a pattern of attitudes qualifies as structurally irrational. It begins by setting up the core of the view I will be defending: a set of attitudes is irrational if and only if it is impossible for those attitudes to be jointly successful. I show that this view can account for a wide range of paradigmatically irrational combinations of attitudes. I then refine the account to make it sufficiently subjective. I argue that a set of attitudes is irrational only if the impossibility of their joint success is (i) logically transparent, (ii) subjectively inferable, and (iii) not justifiably denied.
In Frege’s Puzzle (1986), Nathan Salmón analyzed ‘a withholds believing p’ in terms of a ternary relation BEL of x believing a proposition p under a guise g. The analysis is the following: There is a proposition guise g such that a grasps p by means of g but a does not stand in BEL to p and g. Sean Crawford has made a proposal for Millians to evade propositional guises through second-order belief. Specifically, in effect, Crawford proposes to analyze the crucial notion of withheld belief instead as believing that one does not believe: a believes that a does not believe p. Crawford’s clever proposal thus avoids explicit quantification over guises. However, it is shown that the proposal is inadequate to avoid guises. The resulting notion is too weak to capture the relevant notion of withheld belief.
Philosophy of language has been at the center of philosophical research since at least Frege’s seminal work at the turn of the twentieth century. Since that “linguistic turn,” much of the most important work in philosophy has either involved, or been related to, philosophy of language. The biennial volumes of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language capture cutting-edge, important, original work being done in this area. The series complements the excellent work appearing in the other Oxford Studies volumes. It is a forum for the best new philosophical papers in philosophy of language, by both senior and junior scholars from around the world. Anyone wanting to keep up with the cutting edge of work in the area could start with these volumes.
This chapter’s most general aim is to illuminate the disagreement between singularists about thought (who claim there are non-descriptive thoughts about ordinary external objects) and descriptivists about thought (who claim all thought about ordinary external objects is descriptive). It does this by clarifying the common claim that singular thoughts have an anchoring role with respect to thought in general and by making two further claims: 1) some of the putative disagreements between singularists and descriptivists are illusory once properly understood; and 2) singularists can more productively argue for their view by separating it from some of the framework in which it is commonly packaged. Separating the singular/descriptive thought distinction from the structured content framework, and casting the singularist’s central claim as one about the structure or form of what I will call referentially anchored thoughts, allow us to move past a common kind of impasse.
Frege's fictitious names possess meaning but lack denotation. Both these names and the sentences containing them are deemed fictitious. Since any proper name can potentially refer to an imaginary entity, it is crucial to consider the speaker's intention. When making a statement, the speaker may refer to the real or the imaginary. In the latter case, the thought cannot be explicitly expressed, and consequently, denotation cannot be reached. In Frege's framework, fictional thoughts hold little significance for decision-making and actions. Therefore, we consistently seek to discern whether the discourse pertains to the real or the imaginary. To make this knowledge accessible, it must be incorporated into the content of a sentence, effectively becoming a thought. However, not every statement expresses a thought, even if it conforms to the structure of a sentence. I will now elucidate three intensionalization procedures that Frege proposes for constructing a sentence that expresses a thought, even if certain components within it lack denotation: the articulation of a naming relation, the formulation of a propositional attitude of intention, and the formulation of a propositional attitude that conveys a metafictional context. Through these methods, the speaker's intent to indicate a real or fictional object becomes a constituent of thought, i. e., the sense of the sentence. Fictions themselves become components of thought when they are found in an indirect context, wherein their sense serves as their denotation. When considered independently, the sense of a proper noun is an entity with a parameter that acquires a value in the specific situation where the name is employed by a particular speaker. Frege's foundational concepts are juxtaposed with certain aspects of Aristotle and Leibniz's doctrines.
Teoriile descriptiviste au încercat să elimine anumite contradicții logice dacă numele erau considerate descrieri definite. Kripke a respins valabilitatea acestor teoriile descriptiviste argumentând că nu este nevoie de o descriere unică a identității, se pot utiliza descrieri identificatoare chiar dacă referința nu a fost identificată corect, și o descriere (spre deosebire de un nume) nu poate funcționa ca indicator rigid. Ulterior, teoriile descriptiviste au extins această idee a descrierii definite la un set de descrieri sau o medie ponderată a acestor descrieri.
Saul Kripke’s analysis of the concept of the natural numbers that we are taught in school yields a novel and axiomatically economical way of representing arithmetic in standard set theory—one that helps to answer Benacerraf’s objection from extraneous content as well as Wittgenstein’s objection from unsurveyability. After describing Kripke’s proposal in some detail, we examine it in the light of work by Quine, Steiner, Parsons, Boolos and Burgess. Although the primary aim of this paper is to present and explicate Kripke’s view, we conclude by discussing some of the issues that are faced by Kripke’s proposal, so that the reader can get a sense of the geography of these issues.KeywordsKripkeNumbersArithmeticFoundationsSet theoryAxiom of infinityNumerical notation
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In this contribution, we offer a contextualist analysis of names whereby a name N is used as a felicitous referential term in all and only those contexts of utterance in which N is intended to refer to a unique referent by all cognitive agents that are relevant in the context. This analysis has important across-the-board virtues. It reduces the distance between common nouns and names, under the insight that names are a highly specific case of a more general phenomenon consisting in the pragmatic modulation of the meaning of common nouns. It successfully ties to an important body of syntactic evidence, and contributes to elucidate, in an original and productive manner, many of the unsolved issues concerning the syntactic structure of (complex) names. Finally, it makes a number of philosophical puzzles virtually dissolve without giving up rigid reference for names, but crucially suggesting that the causal theory of reference becomes far-fetched once the linguistic structure of names and their actual use in language and cognition have been carefully evaluated.
In the last decade a new debate concerning the foundations of reference and semantics emerged, which mainly focuses on how to interpret Donnellan’s seminal works and, in particular, on how it differs from Kripke’s influential contributions to so-called “direct reference”. In this paper, I focus on this “new” reading/understanding of Donnellan and how, as it is nowadays presented, differs from Kripke’s picture. I will discuss a Kripke-inspired picture and the way it differs from a Donnellan-inspired one and show that there is a tension between the views that: (i) the token of a name refers to the object conventionally (causally) linked with the tokened name and (ii) the token of a name refers to the object the speaker has in mind. I will end up suggesting that Korta and Perry’s (Critical pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) critical referentialism/pragmatics and their name-notion network conception help to clarify this tension (and possibly evade it).
This paper deals with the semantics and meta-semantics for ordinary names in fiction. It has recently been argued by some philosophers that when ordinary names are used in fictional contexts, they change their semantic contents and work as fictional names in general. In this paper, I argue that there is no compelling reason to believe that such reference changes occur and defend the view that whether those names refer to real or fictional objects depends on which semantic intentions speakers have.
There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a wide range of views about what names are. Prima facie, this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie, it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a revisionary account of the metaphysics of names. Revisionary Millianism, I argue, offers some important advantages over its predicativist competitor.
Semantic internalism is the view that linguistic meaning amounts to forms of conceptual instructions, and that the process of forming linguistic representations does not involve reference to extra-mental entities. Contemporary philosophy of language remains predominantly externalist in focus, having developed systems of extensional reference which depart from classical rationalist assumptions. Semantic internalism is defended here using a broad range of case studies. Particular focus is be placed on exemplar cases such as natural kind and artifactual terms. Typical natural kind terms are shown to have their meaning constructed via a range of cognitive faculties (considerations of material basis being only one of them), and consulting basic properties of language processing and parsing can explain our intuitions about common word use, a major goal of the internalist enterprise. Copredication via inherent polysemy is used as a strong source of evidence for internalism, countering the received view of the externalist character of meaning. Semantic internalism is comprehensively defended against its critics, pushing the exploration of linguistic content and meaning “back into the head”.
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