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Belief Puzzles as Paradoxes of Identity

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Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11939))

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Abstract

This paper approaches traditional puzzles about belief and belief attributions as if they involved instances of paradoxes of identity. I shall argue that the solution to these puzzles comes with a proper understanding of the way we identify individuals in situations where their persistence conditions allow for a “split” (through time or possible worlds) and the way context constraints how we talk about them. My aim in this work is to outline the basics of such a solution and show how well-motivated it is compared to more conventional alternatives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This “referentialist intuition” is stated by the claim that proper names are directly referential expressions, in Kaplan’s sense: i.e. expressions “[…] whose referent, once determined […] is taken as being the propositional component” [2, p. 493].

  2. 2.

    See also [12, p. 328–329], [20, p. 230] or [21, p. 33] for related claims.

  3. 3.

    We can represent the different contents that each of these orthographically identical names have on each of these stories with the following two-dimensional concepts,

    figure a

    where the stories featuring in the vertical axis play the role of utterance situations and the stories on the horizontal axis the role of truth-supporting circumstances.

  4. 4.

    If instead it is (i) that holds, there would be a difference in how we should resolve the paradox at the metaphysical level, but not in the way we would account for the difference in truth-value between (4) and (5), which is my main purpose.

  5. 5.

    The union set W1* ⋃ W2* is the “derive context” set for the Greek’s beliefs, as defined by Stalnaker [9, p. 157]. The derived context (for the Greeks) is determined by the basic context (i.e. the set of possible ways the world might be compatible with what all conversational partners mutually presuppose) in the following way: for each possible world in the basic context, the Greeks are in a belief state defined by the set of possible worlds compatible with what they believe in that world. The union of all these possible belief states is the set of all possible worlds that might, for all it is presupposed in the conversation, be compatible with the Greek’s beliefs. On another note, this set will be typically updated when explicit belief attributions are made, and the update will proceed by the usual intersection operation: e.g. an utterance of ‘A believes that S’ will intersect the derive context for A’s beliefs with the proposition expressed by S (as used in the utterance context).

  6. 6.

    I am here departing from those views like Stalnaker’s [9], Cumming’s [3] or Pickel’s [13], to mention a few, according to which ‘believe’ shifts the contextual parameters relevant for the interpretation of the names that occur within its scope.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. BIAP/LOGOS, Department de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Ramón García Moya

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  1. Ramón García Moya
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Correspondence to Ramón García Moya .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Gábor Bella

  2. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Paolo Bouquet

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Moya, R.G. (2019). Belief Puzzles as Paradoxes of Identity. In: Bella, G., Bouquet, P. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11939. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34974-5_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34974-5_16

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