Abstract
An eminent philosopher was once asked why he bothers with faculty governance instead of spending his time exclusively on matters of philosophic substance. “I started reflecting on attitude reports and the attendant puzzles over 40 years ago,” he replied, “and I’m still thinking. At the end of a long day working on Academic Senate matters, it’s sometimes the case that we have improved significantly the lives of faculty members.” David Kaplan, the hero of this saga, was also known to have said that, in connection with those same puzzles, “a new idea is needed.”
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Notes
- 1.
This latter expression, “propositional content,” should not be taken to suggest that the propositions themselves possess contents. Indeed, a proposition is the same thing as a propositional content. “Propositional content,” then, should not be taken as “the content of a proposition,” but rather as “a content of the propositional kind.”
- 2.
On Frege’s approach, that p not only designates the proposition believed. In an important sense the that p phrase articulates the proposition believed. That is, one can read off the propositional content believed from the that p phrase. This is not true of all ways of designating propositions, e.g. naming a proposition, say, “Elisabeth,” or designating it by means of a description, e.g. “the last proposition enunciated by Schneerson.”
- 3.
Cf. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle…….
- 4.
This is not to suggest that an account of the semantics of belief sentences entails an account of believing.
- 5.
This is not to suggest that Frege et al. have given little thought to our practices of reporting belief. That’s not so. At the same time, as the counterexamples on both sides of the debate, explored below, will show, actual linguistic practice does not fit very well with how the tradition has construed belief reports. Indeed, I’ll argue that our practices suggest an entirely different picture of belief, of believing.
- 6.
Or so I have always read them, as fellow travelers. Others interpret them in other ways and develop direct reference along more Frege-friendly lines.
- 7.
Kripke’s views are another story. His seminal paper, “A Puzzle About Belief,” although it does not articulate a positive picture, clearly distinguishes him from most direct reference advocates—and from the position I’m discussing, on the question at issue.
- 8.
Interestingly, the epistemological intimacy in question is, for Russell, something like that enjoyed, for Frege, by the mind and senses.
- 9.
I’ve argued in several papers and in Chapter 6 of The Magic Prism that Kaplan, in “Demonstratives,” provides a kind of conservative approach to direct reference, one that pays great respect to Frege’s sense-reference picture.
- 10.
As David Braun points out in his paper in (1998), there are many alternatives for filling out the picture of the intermediate entities. One might take them to be linguistic meanings, or (if this is different) Kaplan’s characters, or sentences of a natural language, or mental representations, or mental states. Approaching believing in terms of such intermediate entities has implications for, and may be at least in part motivated by, the famous puzzle cases. I will return to this below.
- 11.
There are two contexts in which talk of substitution arises in discussions of these topics. First, there is the question of inference from one report to another, the question of which substitutions preserve truth. Second, and equally important, there is the question of the latitude enjoyed by the reporter in substituting another name (or other singular term) for the name (or other singular term) uttered by the original speaker, the believer. I am not being careful to discriminate these different kinds of substitution since in much of the discussion it doesn’t matter of which we are speaking.
- 12.
Whether or not the substitution intuitively preserves truth may depend upon subtleties of the context. But there are many such contexts in which truth is indeed preserved, e.g. where what’s important in the context is whether Sam takes the individual in question, i.e. Cicero/Tully, to be an orator (rather than how Sam refers to or conceptualizes this individual).
- 13.
Davidson (1969).
- 14.
Op. Cit.
- 15.
My point is not that senses per se are unnatural—although that’s so also. As Davidson says, “What is strange is not the entities, which are all right in their place (if they have one), but the notion that ordinary words for planets, people, tables and hippopotami in indirect discourse may give up these pedestrian references for the exotica.”
- 16.
There is the additional problem of what to make of the idea of the ordinary sense when indexicals are at issue. I assume that Frege would say that the relevant sense is not the native (incomplete) sense of ‘she’, what ‘she’ expresses in every context, but the complete sense that the indexical obtains in a particular context. This is an idea that has it own problems that are independent of my concerns here.
- 17.
Donnellan’s referentially used descriptions function in many ways like names and so possibly substitution of co-referential ones would preserve truth. What I say, then, in the text may not apply to referential uses, for those who accept Donnellan’s distinction.
- 18.
More fully stated, when a definite description is substituted in the embedded sentence of an attitude report, say for another definite description that denotes the same thing, the truth value is not necessarily preserved. Similarly when a definite description is substituted for a name that refers to the same thing that that the description denotes, they agree that truth is not necessarily preserved.
- 19.
Were there world enough and time, I would append here a discussion of various ways both direct reference and neo-Fregean attempts to defend against the sort of criticisms I’ve been offering.
- 20.
See Burns (2000), see esp. Chapter 7. Burns is attracted to eighteenth century stories about the development of language, stories that illuminate linguistic practice in general and help to break the hold of the sort of time Frege has become the classical spokesman.
- 21.
Of course, the minute one allows any corrections to the original words, one starts down a slippery slope. How much difference is there between the sort of corrections I’m envisaging in the text and, say, correcting for the use of indexicals in the speaker’s original context—the reporter can “update” the speaker’s use of “I” by using the speaker’s name in the quoted report? Does this make it indirect quotation, or is this still direct? Quine’s policy apparently is to allow no variation at all in direct quotation. Thus the bird-call remark. The distinction between direct and indirect is a distinction of art—or philosophy—since in actual practice we use quotation marks with varying degrees of correction. And so lines need to be drawn.
- 22.
It will come as no surprise that Quine—who has no use for “propositional content”— is focused on the sentence that the reporter embeds.
- 23.
What happened to ‘that’ in “that p? Quine doesn’t address this. And not having any good idea about it, I’m happy to let it go for now. This needs to be a future agenda item, a detail, but an important one.
- 24.
“…a word standing between quotation marks,” he writes in “On Sense and Reference,” “must not be taken as having its ordinary reference.” All references to Frege on this page are to “On Sense and Reference,” p. 58–59.
- 25.
Kripke, “Speaker Reference and Semantic Reference” op. cit. p. 268.
- 26.
Cf. Searle in (1969); and Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §16.
- 27.
Nor is it part of such a device as on the view that it’s the expression that p that refers to the proposition asserted.
- 28.
My picture is a bit like Davidson’s. Davidson says that the “that” in “He said that p” is a demonstrative, followed by a saying that is demonstrated. I don’t have views about the precise function of the “that” and I want to avoid Davidson’s (and the tradition’s) idea that the sentence is relational. But I like the idea that the reporter does a unique kind of saying of the embedded sentence.
- 29.
The Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, suggested that each of us has a pre-determined, quite finite number of words allotted. A person expires with his last word. A word to the wise.
- 30.
When we consider the evidence for someone’s believing something, we tend to emphasize the agent’s behavior, verbal and other. But his affective reactions are also important, like his surprise at coming upon certain states of affairs, etc. Eric Schwitzgebel emphasizes this in his paper (2002).
- 31.
See his paper, “A Puzzle About Belief” op. cit.
- 32.
Such a phenomenon seems possible also in cases of reporting belief. The problem in such a case would not be the indigestibility of the inputs, but rather the problem of simultaneously satisfying the goals of reporting belief.
- 33.
Although given his resolution, perhaps that was a kind of plausible assumption Kripke advances, one that does not quite make it through Kripke’s conclusion.
- 34.
When Kripke speaks of translation—he enunciates a “principle of translation,”—my sense is that he speaks not about what I called actual translation, but of the philosopher’s ideal of capturing literal meaning in alternative words.
- 35.
My view thus has the consequence that a sincere utterance is not necessarily one in accord with one’s belief.
- 36.
In my book, The Magic Prism, I so conclude about many of the allegedly fatal problems for the Millian.
- 37.
Think of the application of belief-talk to animals and infants as an extension, natural enough, of the concept. Somewhat similarly, talk of unconscious belief can be seen as a natural—even if a late and ingenious—extension. Unconscious believers exhibit enough of the sort of coherent pattern with belief that p to be counted among the believers, even if their “belief” is not, in the ordinary course of things, available to them.
- 38.
See Putnam (1994) for a discussion of this well-discussed but still insufficiently appreciated phenomenon.
- 39.
Collins should not get the credit for my version of it. I’m joking; he does not agree that we agree.
- 40.
Thanks to Megan Stotts for very helpful editorial assistance. My reorientation of our thinking about belief and reporting belief raises questions that the received view seemed to accommodate en passant, questions like the following: What becomes of belief-desire explanations of action? Are they causal explanations? How can they be on such an ethereal picture of belief? What becomes of the usual philosophical idea that sincere speech is speech caused by belief? And of course many others. Some of these I have pondered and could almost write about; others await study.
References
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Wettstein, H. (2016). Speaking for Another. In: Capone, A., Kiefer, F., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_19
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