In "A Puzzle about Belief" Saul Kripke appeals to a principle of disquotation that allows us to infer a person's beliefs from the sentences to which she assents (in certain conditions). Kripke relies on this principle in constructing some famous puzzle cases, which he uses to defend the Millian view that the sole semantic function of a proper name is to refer to its bearer. The examples are meant to undermine the anti-Millian objection, grounded in traditional Frege-cases, that truth-value is not always maintained when coreferential names are intersubstituted in belief reports. I argue here that our disquotational practice is sensitive to certain shifts in conversational context, and it is only if we overlook these shifts-if we "misdisquote"-that we can draw the conclusions Kripke wants to draw from his examples. In the wake of this conclusion, I provide a "contextualist" treatment of Kripke's puzzle cases. I show how this treatment is motivated by certain nonns of rationality, and I defend these norms against an intriguing "anti-Cartesian" theory of mind. Throughout the paper, I develop the larger implications that my treatment of Kripke's argument has for the semantic theory of names and belief reports, and, more generally, for our picture of the relation between linguistic behaviour and our states of mind.

Misdisquotation and substitutivity: when not to infer belief from assent

My primary goal in this paper is to focus attention on a certain conception of internal access, on the Cartesian conception that a rational subject's capacity to determine sameness and difference in explicit propositional attitudes is independent of knowledge of the external world. This conception of introspection plays a crucial, if unacknowledged, role in numerous arguments and theoretical positions. In particular, it plays a large role in motivating psychological internalism. I argue in favor of rejecting this epistemology and the internalism it supports.

Psychophysical supervenience: Its epistemological foundation

Kripke's Pierre puzzle undermines some of the central epistemic intuitions that underlie traditional defences of the Fregean assumption that sentences'S believes that Fa ‘and'S believes that Fb’ can differ in truth value, even though a = b. Millian theorists have seized on this and employed the puzzle to reject the Fregean assumption itself. I argue that Millians are correct in rejecting traditional defences of the Fregean assumption, but they are wrong in rejecting the Fregean assumption itself. To this end, I offer a different argument kr the assumption, one that is not open to Kripkean/Millian objections.

Pierre and the Fundamental Assumption

Van Heijenoort’s main contribution to history and philosophy of modern logic was his distinction between two basic views of logic, first, the absolutist, or universalist, view of the founding fathers, Frege, Peano, and Russell, which dominated the first, classical period of history of modern logic, and, second, the relativist, or model-theoretic, view, inherited from Boole, Schroder, and Lowenheim, which has dominated the second, contemporary period of that history. In my paper, I present the man Jean van Heijenoort (Sect. 1); then I describe his way of arguing for the second view (Sect. 2); and finally I come down in favor of the first view (Sect. 3). There, I specify the version of universalism for which I am prepared to argue (Sect. 3, introduction). Choosing ZFC to play the part of universal, logical (in a nowadays forgotten sense) system, I show, through an example, how the usual model theory can be naturally given its proper place, from the universalist point of view, in the logical framework of ZFC; I outline another, not rival but complementary, semantics for admissible extensions of ZFC in the very same logical framework; I propose a way to get universalism out of the predicaments in which universalists themselves believed it to be (Sect. 3.1). Thus, if universalists of the classical period did not, in fact, construct these semantics, it was not that their universalism forbade them, in principle, to do so. The historical defeat of universalism was not technical in character. Neither was it philosophical. Indeed, it was hardly more than the victory of technicism over the very possibility of a philosophical dispute (Sect. 3.2).

In Defense of Logical Universalism: Taking Issue with Jean van Heijenoort

The author presents and defends a general view about belief, and certain attributions of belief, with the intention of providing a solution to Saul Kripke's puzzle about belief. According to the position developed in the paper, there are two senses in which one could be said to have contradictory beliefs. Just one of these senses threatens the rationality of the believer; but Kripke's puzzle concerns only the other one. The general solution is then extended to certain variants of Kripke's original puzzle, which have to do with belief attributions containing empty names and kind terms.

Rationality and Puzzling Beliefs

Kripke derives his puzzle from these principles. Applied in a story about a native French speaker, Pierre, who learns English by the direct method, the principles leave us uncertain whether Pierre believes that London is pretty or that London is not pretty. Kripke concludes that belief contexts seem to be paradoxical and consequently that at the present time there is little justification '. . . for the use of alleged failure of substitutivity in belief contexts to draw any significant conclusion about proper names.' (p. 270). In this paper I argue that Kripke misuses the translation principle. But let us first review quickly how Kripke's puzzle arises. As a result of what he has heard in French, Pierre is inclined to assert, 'Londres est jolie'. But after learning English in a shabby part of London, and failing to realize that 'Londres' and 'London' refer to the same place, Pierre asserts, 'London is not pretty'. By the disquotation and translation principles applied to French, Pierre should have inconsistent beliefs. Yet Kripke holds that we cannot accept this conclusion, nor give a rational answer to the question, 'What does Pierre believe?' Suppose now that Pierre takes a break from his study of English and spends a short time in Paris. He decides to return to London on a train via the new channel tunnel, which has only just been completed, and which he has never used before. He boards the train in Paris, and in a remarkably short time he is travelling through the English countryside. The sophisticated train (very fast) soon stops at a station where Pierre sees a sign with the label 'Londres', put there for the benefit of the French visitors. Pierre says,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2253785

D. E. Over

Papers

On Kripke's Puzzle