Belief-Sentences: Outline of a Nominalistic Approach

Abstract

What I call a nominalistic analysis of belief-sentences is an explication of the meaning of sentences of the form ‘A believes that p’ that does not commit the analyst to the existence of special abstract entities such as sets, Fregean senses and propositions, or universal properties and relations. I take it, without discussing the point here, that if it is feasible, such an analysis is prima facie philosophically preferable to a realistic one for general reasons of clarity and ontological economy. But the question, of course, is: is it, in some reasonable way, feasible? Standard nominalistic approaches to belief-sentences all face well-known and crucial difficulties. The quotational theory, according to which the object-sentence ‘p’ is quoted or mentioned within the belief- sentence ‘A believes that p’, fails the Langford-Church translation test.¹ The metalinguistic analysis, on the other hand, according to which the ‘that’-clause within the belief-sentence is, in every case, a primitive metalinguistic predicate fails to satisfy Davidson’s learnability requirement.² And Davidson’s own approach, the so-called paratactic theory, according to which ‘A believes that p’ means simply ‘A believes this, p’ fails, for all its virtues, to accommodate some important illocutionary and logical characteristics of belief- sentences.³ These negative results from the last four or five decades of debates led more than one phi-losopher to conclude drastically that nominalism just can’t cope with belief-sentences in any satisfactory way. What I would like to show here is that there is still at least one more line of investigation for nominalism in this endeavour. Space being severely limited, I will be content to sketch the general features of this hitherto unexplored approach and to list some of the motivations for it as well as some of its theoretical advantages.

This paper stems from a research project supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and by Quebec’s FCAR Fund, both of which I want to express my gratitude to. Thanks are also due to Élizabeth Karger, Grzegorz Malinowski, François Récanati, Philippe de Rouilhan, and Daniel Vanderveken for helpful remarks and criticisms on a previous version of the paper.