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Precis of Jonathan Berg, Direct Belief: An Essay on the Semantics, Pragmatics, and Metaphysics of Belief

Mouton Series in Pragmatics, 13. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012

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Abstract

In Direct Belief I argue for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, I use Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and go on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted “Inner Speech” Picture of Thought. The work serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics.

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Notes

  1. The main arguments in favor of theories of direct reference, from the loci classici of Donnellan (1970); Kaplan (1978, 1979, 1989); Kripke (1972), and Putnam (1975), are nicely summed up by Salmon (1986: ch. 5) and Soames (2002: ch. 2).

  2. Exactly what counts as “having a belief about an individual” and as “unmediated” is discussed later in the book at length; to forestall possible misunderstandings in the meantime one might think of having a belief about an individual as its being the case that there is some individual of whom one believes that he is so-and-so. Thus, where one believes, e.g., that the 44th president of the United States is clever, one has a belief about a certain individual—Barack Obama—that he is clever; and my claim is that one thereby stands in a binary relation with Barack Obama which does not essentially involve conceptions, modes of presentation, or other alleged components of a medium in which beliefs are held. See also Chapter 2, note 1, and Chapter 3, Section 1, especially note 4.

  3. I do not presume that the prima facie problems confronting the Fregean approach are more than just prima facie; I myself have suggested elsewhere how Fregeans might get around the problem of “substitution success” (Berg, 1988: 358). But I find the evidence adduced here for the first option more compelling.

  4. Some ideas about how particular versions of the Theory of Direct Belief might go may be found in the work of Ramsey (1931); Armstrong (1973); Price (1969); Baker (1995), and Schwitzgebel (2002).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Haifa, 3498838, Israel

    Jonathan Berg

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Berg, J. Precis of Jonathan Berg, Direct Belief: An Essay on the Semantics, Pragmatics, and Metaphysics of Belief . Philosophia 45, 7–17 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9663-x

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