## 1. Frege's Puzzle



Powerful considerations developed by
 Gottlob Frege
 in his 1892 suggest that words within the scope of a propositional
attitude verb cannot function as they do outside those linguistic
environments. Frege presents his puzzle as one about the relationship
between the cognitive value of expressions and their ordinary
reference, arguing that the two must be distinct.



Frege's puzzle can be posed as a question about propositional
attitude attributions. (We will use the verb 'believe' in
the discussion of these puzzles. Similar puzzles arise with other
propositional attitude verbs.) Consider, for example, Lois Lane before
her discovery of Superman's "true identity,"
pretending that the Superman stories as actual fact. Lois is familiar
with Clark Kent, her fellow employee, and Superman, the hero she most
admires, but she does not recognize that the person she calls
'Clark Kent' is identical with the person she calls
'Superman'. (This doesn't really do justice to what
Lois fails to realize and there are problems specifying what Lois is
ignorant of. See the supplementary document:



> 
> Ignorance of Identities
> 



In the text we'll simply skip over these complications.) So, we
would ordinarily accept the following sentences as true.



> 
> 
> (1) Lois believes that Superman is strong.
> 
> 
> 
> (2) Lois believes that Clark Kent is not strong.
> 
> 
> 
> (3) Lois does not believe that Clark Kent is strong.
> 
> 
> 



When we compare (1) with (2) and (3), it seems apparent that the names
'Superman' and 'Clark Kent' make different
semantic contributions to the sentences in which they occur. In
particular, it appears that replacing 'Superman' in (1)
with the co-referring 'Clark Kent' changes the true (1) to
the false (4).



> 
> (4) Lois believes that Clark Kent is strong.
> 



Since 'Clark Kent' and 'Superman' have the
same reference, it seems that something other than the reference of
the names must be relevant to the semantic evaluation of the belief
attribution.



Without propositional attitude attributions, one might hope for a
simpler semantics, in which only the referent of a name is relevant to
the evaluation of sentences that contain it. For consider the
following pair of sentences.



> 
> (5) Superman is strong.
> 
> 
> (6) Clark Kent is strong.
> 
> 
> 



(5) is true iff (6) is true. Indeed, it is plausible to insist further
that the two sentences have the same modal profile. Even if Lois and
others do not realize it, these sentences, given their meanings, must
have the same truth-value. Each involves a reference to the same
individual and each predicates the same property of that
individual.



However, if we expect an adequate semantics to account for the
difference in cognitive value of (5) and (6) (Lois accepts (5) but not
(6)), we must recognize a semantic difference in the contribution of
the two names.



We can get to the same conclusion by a different route. The trip,
although somewhat lengthy, is worth taking. Lois is disposed to
sincerely, reflectively, and competently accept (5) while denying (6).
Lois is, presumably, also disposed to accept the following
sentence.



> 
> (7) Clark Kent is not strong.
> 



It is plausible to link an agent's sincere, reflective, and
competent acceptance of a sentence with what she believes. The
Disquotation principle, so-called by Saul Kripke in his 1979, does
just that. (Our formulation of the principle differs from
Kripke's in providing missing time and context indices.)



> 
> **Disquotation**.
>   
> 
> If an agent *A* sincerely, reflectively, and competently
> accepts a sentence *s* (under circumstances properly related to
> a context *c*), then *A* believes, at the time of
> *c*, what *s* expresses in *c*.
> 



(Why relativize to context and time? Suppose an agent accepts 'I
am hungry' at t. It should not follow from this that she
believes what is expressed by 'I am hungry' as uttered by
you - unless you happen to be the agent in question. It also
shouldn't follow that she always persists in believing what she
believes; she is free to change her mind on the matter.)



Given Disquotation, Lois's acceptance of (5) and (7) entails
that (1) and (2) are true. Now, as deplorable as Lois's
cognitive state is, it seems wrong to convict her of irrationality;
she does not seem to believe a contradiction "in the sense in
which thoughtful people do not." (The phrase comes from Perry
1977.) But then it would seem that 'Clark Kent' must not
be substitutable for 'Superman' in (1), else she would. If
the substitution of 'Clark Kent' for
'Superman' in (1) did preserve truth, as it does in (5),
then the truth of (1) (and the fact that 'Clark Kent' and
'Superman' are co-designating) would entail (4). But if
both (2) and (4) are true, then, it would appear, Lois believes a
proposition and its negation and would thus be guilty of
irrationality. As she is intuitively not irrational,
'Superman' in (1) is not substitutable *salva
veritate* for 'Clark Kent'.



If it seems reasonable to infer agents's beliefs from their
acceptance patterns, thus leading us to Disquotation, it may seem
equally plausible to infer what agents do not believe from what they
withhold acceptance from, leading us to Converse Disquotation
below.



> 
> **Converse Disquotation**.
>   
> 
> If an agent *A* sincerely, reflectively, and competently denies
> or withholds acceptance from a sentence *s* (in a context
> *c*), then *A* does not believe, at the time of
> *c*, what *s* expresses in *c*.
> 



Converse Disquotation and the fact that Lois denies (6) entail that
(3) is true. But if both (1) and (3) are true, then, it would seem, we
should not allow substitution of co-designating singular terms within
the scope of propositional attitude verb, or the threat of
contradiction we saw above will be brought home to us, the ascriber.
For substitution of 'Clark Kent' for
'Superman' in (1) would commit us to (4), which
contradicts (3).



Using Disquotation and Converse Disquotation (together with
intuitively plausible acceptance patterns on the part of Lois,
considerations of Lois's rationality, and intuitive
considerations of what rationality consists in) commit us to the truth
of (1)-(3) and the falsity of (4), and thus, it would seem, to a
denial of a substitution principle for co-designating singular terms
within the scope of propositional attitude verbs. If both (1) and (3)
are true, then, one would think, (1) and (4) must say different
things. This in turn seems to commit us to the claim that 'Clark
Kent' and 'Superman' have different semantically
relevant values as they occur in (1) and (2). (In distinguishing these
two arguments we follow Kripke 1979. Kripke does not endorse the
conclusion of these arguments. Instead, Kripke argues that the
so-called Millian thesis is not to blame for Frege puzzles but an
inadequacy in our very practice of reporting propositional attitudes.
We discuss Kripke further below in section 9.)



In summary, Frege calls our attention to two problems, (i) the problem
of the apparent difference in truth-value of corresponding belief
attributions (such as (1) and (4)), and (ii) the problem of the
difference in the cognitive significance of sentences composed in the
same way of elements with the same reference (such as (5) and (6)). If
distinct belief attributions indicate differences in cognitive value
of the sentences in their *that*-clauses, then these two
problems are really a single problem, presumably with a single
solution.



[For further discussion of these problems, see the subsection on
 Frege's Puzzles
 in the entry on
 Gottlob Frege.]


## 2. Frege's theory



Frege held that correct propositional attitude attributions must
indicate the way that individuals are represented by the agent (the
agent's *mode of presentation* of the referent) and that
an occurrence of a referential expression within the scope of a
propositional attitude verb refers to a way of representing an object
rather than to the expression's ordinary referent.
'Superman' and 'Clark' as they occur in (5)
and (6) refer to the same man, known under these two different names.
(5) and (6) share common referents but express different propositions
or thoughts. Those same expressions as they occur in (1) and (4),
however, refer to different ways that Lois has of representing the man
Superman. According to Frege, this difference in reference explains
the difference in truth-value of (1) and (4). The ordinary sense of an
expression - the way that the expression indicates its referent
- becomes a part of the truth-conditions for a sentence in which
the expression occurs, if that expression is used within a belief
context. Within this linguistic environment, expressions refer to
their customary senses.



Frege held two distinct theses about terms in the scope of
propositional attitude verbs - that they refer to the
agent's way of representing the object and that they refer to
the ordinary sense. Frege unifies these theses by maintaining that the
ordinary sense is a way of representing an object. Thus he can explain
the difference in truth-value between (1) and (4). Propositional
attitude verbs induce a shift in reference; occurrences of expressions
within their scope refer to what Frege called their customary sense.
Within the scope of an attitude verb expressions refer to what they
express when outside the scope of an attitude verb. So, although
'Superman' and 'Clark' are co-referring as
they occur in (5) and (6), they are not in (1) and (4), when inside
the scope of a propositional attitude verb.



Frege's claim that propositional attitude verbs induce a
reference shift allows him to preserve a substitution principle. The
fact that (1) is true while (4) is false does not show that
substituting co-referring singular terms within the scope of attitude
verbs is illegitimate; instead, for Frege, it shows that
'Superman' and 'Clark', *as they occur in
(1) and (4)*, are not co-referring.



The difference in sense between 'Superman' and
'Clark' also explains the difference in cognitive value
between (5) and (6). Although both sentences have the same
truth-value, because the constituents are co-referential, they express
different senses, because the names 'Clark Kent' and
'Superman' express different senses, according to Frege.
Although the truth-value of a sentence depends on the referents of
terms, the cognitive value depends on the senses attached to the
terms.



[For further discussion of Frege's theory, see the subsection on
 Frege's Theory of Sense and Denotation
 in the entry on
 Gottlob Frege.]



So, Frege's accounts of the two problems he calls our attention
to coincide. (1) and (4) differ in truth-value precisely because (5)
and (6) express different propositions.


## 3. Problems for the simple Fregean solution



Frege's solution to Frege's puzzle has been criticized on
several fronts. Some accuse it for violating semantic innocence.
(Davidson 1968 is the *locus classicus* of this complaint;
Barwise and Perry 1983 develop the charge.) Proponents of semantic
innocence see an expression as having the same reference in a wide
body of linguistic environments. In particular, 'Superman'
is seen as having the same reference in (1) as it does in (5).



Sometimes semantic innocence is just taken as a raw datum. But one
might also substantiate the claim by considering anaphora across
attitude verbs. (For more, see the entry on
 anaphora.)
 Consider the following.



> 
> (8) Jack and Jill went up the hill and Jack believes that she went up
> first.
> 



There is a reading of (8) where 'she', as it occurs in
(8), is anaphoric on 'Jill'; that is, 'she' is
anchored to 'Jill', in the sense that the reference of the
former is inherited from the reference of the later.
'Jill', as it occurs in (8), is outside the scope of a
propositional attitude verb and hence has its customary reference. So,
then, it would seem, 'she' must also have the customary
reference of 'Jill' and hence must refer to an individual
and not a sense. This runs contrary to Frege's reference-shift
claim. More generally, Frege's theory seems to have trouble
accounting for the truth of sentences like (8), as 'she'
(for example) seems to simply pick out Jill herself independently of
any mode of presentation. (Sentence (8) tells us nothing about how
Jack represents Jill.) Soames 1989 presents a similar argument against
the Fregean solution, although he does not use it to argue for
semantic innocence directly. The point is related to the more general
worry that Fregean accounts cannot offer an adequate account of *de
re* belief. (See the supplementary document on 



> 
> The *De Re*/*De Dicto* Distinction
> 



for further discussion.)



The Fregean should not be terribly perturbed by these observations.
First, even if we find semantic innocence a virtue, the key insights
behind Frege's solution can be applied without invoking
reference-shifting. And it is reference-shifting, not the
sense/reference distinction itself, that innocence forbids.
Frege's key insights are that singular terms have both a sense
and a reference, that co-referring singular terms can have different
senses, and that propositional attitude verbs are sensitive to the
(customary) senses of the expressions embedded in their scope and not
merely their (customary) referents. Frege pulled off the last insight
by claiming that propositional attitude verbs induce a
reference-shift. But there are other ways to get the same result. One
might, for example, claim that 'believes' functions
somewhat like 'so-called' in (9) below.



> 
> (9) Giorgione was so-called because of his size.
> 



(The example is from Quine 1953.) 'Giorgione', as it
occurs in (9), simply refers to the man Giorgione. But substitution is
illegitimate because 'so-called' refers to the expression
preceding it and not merely the referent of that expression. So,
substitution fails but not because the substitution affects the
reference of the terms. Rather, substituting 'Giorgione'
with the co-referring 'Barbarelli' in (9) affects the
reference of 'so' in 'so-called'. (This
differs from Quine's own explanation of why substitution fails
in (9).)



Similarly, a neo-Fregean might claim that expressions have their
customary references and senses whether inside or outside the scope of
a propositional attitude verb, thus ensuring semantic innocence, but
insist that propositional attitude verbs themselves are in some way
sensitive to the senses of the expressions within their scope and not
merely their references. Then substitution of co-referring singular
terms within the scope of an attitude verb is blocked, as such
substitution affects the semantic value of the attitude verb itself,
but innocence is preserved. (See Forbes 1989, 1990, 1993 for
development of a similar idea. Pietroski 1996 argues for a Fregean
account that respects innocence as well, although his account, unlike
Forbes's, is developed in the Davidsonian framework.) So, a
Fregean can accept semantic innocence.



Furthermore, it is far from clear that semantic innocence must be
accepted. We cannot directly intuit that an occurrence of a proper
name in the scope of an attitude verb has the same reference as an
occurrence of that name outside the scope of that attitude verb. That
is too theoretical a claim to be within the domain of intuition. It
must be supported by argument and we can question whether the
phenomena of cross-attitudinal anaphora support semantic innocence. In
his 1969, Kaplan taught us how we can be Fregeans and allow
quantifying into attitude verbs. (See the supplementary document on
the *de re*/*de dicto* distinction, *op cit*.,
for the details.) The key idea was to introduce a relation between an
individual-concept and the object it determines; Kaplan, following
Church 1951, called this *D*, which is a "denotation
predicate." The same technique can be used to account for the
anaphoric dependence of a pronoun inside the scope of an attitude verb
on a singular term outside the scope of that verb. A sentence like (8)
would then be read as something like: "Jack and Jill went up the
hill and (there is an individual-concept *c* that
"designates" Jill such that) Jack stands in the belief
relation to the proposition consisting of *c* and the semantic
value of 'went up first'." There may well be
problems with this account. But its mere presence shows two things.
First, one needs an argument for the claim that a proper treatment of
cross-attitudinal anaphoric relations is possible only if semantic
innocence is accepted. And that argument will have to show what is
wrong with a view like the one suggested by Kaplan, as that view
promises to show how a reference-shifting view can accommodate the
phenomena. Second, and relatedly, one cannot refute the Fregean claim
that proper names have both a sense and a reference and that
propositional attitude ascriptions are sensitive to sense and not just
reference simply by producing sentences like (8).



The simple Fregean solution, however, faces other, more serious,
problems. First, the account seems to fail when we try to extend it to
other types of attitude reporting sentences than the classical
examples we have considered above. One of our most common ways of
referring to individuals is to use indexicals and demonstratives, such
as 'I', 'you', 'this',
'she', and 'they'. It is difficult to
accommodate the use of such terms with a Fregean theory that requires
that the mode of presentation is the semantic value of a singular term
in a propositional attitude clause. (See Perry 1977, 1979 and Kaplan
1977, pp. 529-36 for a development of the problem of indexicals
and demonstratives. See Evans 1985 for an attempt to solve the
problems indexicals pose for a Fregean solution to Frege's
puzzle. For more recent attempts, see Heck 2002.)



Frege's solution, remember, involves two claims: that indicating
the sense is indicating the way the believer represents the individual
and that belief attributions indicate the sense. These two claims seem
to get the wrong results for propositional attitude reporting
sentences with indexicals in their complement clauses. Consider, for
example, the following sentence.



> 
> (10) Alice believes that I will solve an important problem in physics.
> 



Suppose that Bob Smith utters (10). Smith's use of
'I' tells us nothing about how Alice represents Smith; in
particular, it does not refer to or otherwise involve anything that we
would ordinarily call the *sense* of 'I'. (It would
be strange indeed if what made the attribution true was Alice's
standing in the belief relation to a proposition containing the
first-person mode of presentation associated with 'I' and
the semantic value of 'will solve an important problem in
physics'. If there is such a first-person mode of presentation,
then this is what it is for Alice to believe that *she*
*herself* will solve an important problem in physics, which is
not what Smith was saying in uttering (10).) Call this the *problem
of indexicals*. (There is a large literature on this problem. A
first wave of important work on the problem include Castaneda
1966,1967. 1999, Chisholm 1981, Evans 1982, especially chapters
6-7, Frege 1956, Lewis 1981, Perry 1977, 1979, Stalnaker 1981.
For more recent important papers, see: Cappelen and Dever 2014,
Garcia-Carpintero 2013, 2017, Magidor 2015, McKay 1986, Perry 1997,
1998, 2001, Recanati 2007.) 



The problem is that the perspective connected to a use of an indexical
in an attitude report is not typically intended to match the
perspective of the target of the report. For example, Jane might tell
you that Lois believes that he is strong, pointing at Clark Kent,
without expecting the perspective associated with her use of
'he' to match in any straightforward way Lois's
perspective. Indeed, it is quite intuitive that one might truly report
another's beliefs using a demonstrative to refer to something
that agent is not in a position to refer to demonstratively in any way
whatsoever.



A related problem involves attributions of a common belief to many
people. Like the problem of indexicals, this problem raises questions
for the Fregean claim that a belief attribution indicates the way in
which the believer represents an individual in belief. It seems
plausible that different people associate different modes of
presentation with the same name. If so, the following sort of sentence
seems to prove difficult for the Fregean.



> 
> (11) Many people believe that Bob Smith will solve an important
> problem in physics.
> 



Someone attributing such a belief cannot be responsible for the many
modes of representation that the various believers associate with
'Bob Smith'. It may seem that the theory could work in
this case only if we could find a sense for 'Bob Smith'
that does not vary from person to person and that can serve as the
mode of presentation of that individual for each person. That seem
unlikely. Let's call this the *problem of variability in
sense*. (See Richard 1988 for a development of the variability
problem. See Forbes 1989, 1990 for an attempt to solve it.)



Fregeans should accept that the truth of (10) does not require that
Alice think of the speaker under a first-person mode of presentation
associated with 'I' and that the truth of (11) does not
require that everyone think of Smith in the same way. But, as a
Fregean, they will insist that the truth of these reports require more
than merely having beliefs with the relevant referential content. One
way to pull this off is to attempt to construct a similarity class of
modes of presentations. We say that the truth of (10) only requires
that Alice think of the speaker in a *suitably related* way to
the first-person mode of presentation the attributer associates with
'I' and (11) requires only that everyone think of Smith in
some *suitably related* way to sense the attributer associates
with 'Bob Smith'. The work will all be done in specifying
what it is for an arbitrary mode of presentation to be suitably
related to the attributer's mode of presentation. Presumably a
Fregean would want the similarity class to be defined more narrowly
than just in terms of co-reference. (Dummett 1973, p. 384 suggested
that Frege subscribed to a view where reference-preservation sufficed
for reports with indexicals. There is little plausibility to such a
historical claim, particularly in light of Frege's comments on
indexicals in his 1918.) Finding such a middle ground between identity
of sense and mere co-reference may well prove to be difficult indeed.
However, much of what Mark Richard says in his 1990 (discussed below
in
 Section 6)
 about restrictions on correlation functions can be employed by the
Fregean to try to find this middle ground. So, the problems of
indexicals and variability do not seem fatal to a broadly Fregean
account of propositional attitude reporting sentences.



Related to the above problems facing a Fregean view is the problem of
intuitive entailment-successes. Suppose that Bill utters the sentence
'I am happy' and Lois believes him. Then, intuitively,
there is something such that Bill said it and Lois believes it. But it
is hard to see how the Fregean can account for such apparent
entailment-successes, precisely because of the way in which the
account explains intuitive entailment-failures like (1) and (4).



There are many important neo-Fregean account that have been developed
and promise to avoid these problems, including: Church 1951, Cumming
2008, Evans 1982, Forbes 1990, Garcia-Carpintero 2017, Heck 2002,
2012, 2014, Zalta 2001.)



Many have taken the problems presented above to show that the only
semantically relevant value of a singular term in the scope of a
propositional attitude verb is its reference and so reject Fregean
solution to Frege's puzzle. But if we insist that the sole
semantically relevant value of a singular term is its reference, what
is there to say about the intuitive difference between (1) and (4) and
the arguments that they differ in truth-value?


## 4. The Naive Russellian theory



Anti-Fregeans draw their inspiration from
 Bertrand Russell.
 Russell proposed what we might call an acquaintance-based theory of
thought, according to which some of our thoughts are directly about
the individuals they concern. We follow Kaplan 1977 in calling such
propositions *singular propositions*. A proposition is singular
with respect to an object **o** just in case it is about
**o** in virtue of having **o** as a direct
constituent. It is general with respect to **o**, on the
other hand, just in case it concerns **o** but only in
virtue of having a proxy of **o** that determines, either
by satisfaction conditions or otherwise, **o.** Russell
maintained that there are *logically proper names*, which
contribute only their referents to the propositions expressed by
sentences that contain them in subject position. He thus maintained
that sentences containing logically proper names express singular
propositions.



But Russell was stingy in what he counted as a genuine logically
proper name. For Russell, only 'this', as a name of a
sense datum, and perhaps 'I', when Russell set aside his
Humean doubts with one's acquaintance with a self, are genuine
names. Ordinary external world objects cannot be named and are known
only by description, according to Russell. This is because one can
have a genuine name only for that with which one is acquainted and one
is acquainted only with that for which misidentification is not
rationally open and the individual's existence is certain. So,
if one is presented with an individual and it is possible to be
presented with that individual again and not realize it is the same
object as before, then one is not acquainted with that individual;
one's thoughts about that individual are, in that case, all
indirect. This line of reasoning relies on the Fregean claim that
cases of identity confusion must be explained in terms of a difference
in thought-constituents. This led Russell to agree with Frege
regarding the truth-values of (1)-(4) and agree that (5) and (6)
express different propositions. But Russell still insisted that such
thought is ultimately grounded in acquaintance with individuals,
albeit not extra-mental individuals distinct from the self. Frege, on
the other hand, maintained that all thought was indirect, in the sense
that a thought is about an object **o** not in virtue of
having **o** as a direct constituent but rather by having
a surrogate as a direct constituent that then determined
**o**, most plausibly in virtue of satisfaction
conditions.



Let's consider an example to better appreciate Russell's
views about our thoughts about external reality. Suppose that you are
sitting before an object and say to yourself, "That apple is
green." You are acquainted, Russell thinks, with the universal
GREEN. But you are not acquainted with the apple itself, as
misidentification is possible. Your thought about the apple is
therefore by thought by description. But the description is not, for
Russell, purely qualitative. Indeed, the description is
individual-involving. In virtue of your visual experience of the
apple, you are acquainted with a sense-datum caused by the apple. Call
this sense-datum *BILL*; Russell would use the demonstrative
'that', pointing inward at your occurrent sense-datum. The
content of your thought about the apple, according to Russell, is then
something like the following.



> 
> <[the *x*: *x* causes BILL] *x* is green>
> 



This proposition is general and thus indirect with respect to the
external object (in this case, the apple), but singular and thus
direct with respect to the sense-datum being demonstratively referred
to. For Russell, this is the canonical form all thought about external
reality takes. Thought about concrete particulars is ultimately
grounded in acquaintance, albeit acquaintance with sense data, and
descriptive. (For a very intuitive presentation of this view, see
chapter 5 of Russell 1912. For a more detailed presentation, see
Russell 1910.)



It is clear that this is Russell's view for the contents of
thought. It is less clear, however, that Russell was a descriptivist
about the semantics of ordinary proper names in public language.
Indeed, there is good evidence that Russell thought that ordinary
public language names have as their sole semantic value their
referents and hence that simple sentences containing them express
singular propositions, but that most of us at least cannot entertain
those propositions and can only think about them under descriptions.
(For a very nice defense of this asymmetric interpretation of Russell,
see Sainsbury 1993.)



More recent Russellians have, following Russell, maintained the
objects of our thought are, in many cases, singular propositions. But
they have broken from Russell in maintaining that extra-mental
individuals - like your apple - can also be constituents
of the thoughts we grasp. Let's call such theorists
*neo-Russellians*. (See Donnellan 1990 for a nice discussion of
Russell's view in contrast with what we are here calling
neo-Russellians.) Neo-Russellianism is a standard, although by no
means universal, view in contemporary philosophy of language and mind.
There are important differences among neo-Russellians concerning what
extra-mental objects can be thought of directly and, more importantly,
which relations (perceptual, communicative, etc.) ground and are
necessary for direct thought. (For a discussion of this issue, see
Jeshion 2002, 2004 and the papers collected in Jeshion 2010. See also
Crane 2011, 2013, especially chapter 6, Hawthorne and Manley 2012,
Martin 2002, Recanti 2012, 2016. See also the supplementary document
on 



> 
> The *De Re*/*De Dicto* Distinction
> 



for further discussion.)



All neo-Russellians deny the Fregean idea that all cases of
misidentification are to be explained in terms of a difference in
thought. Unlike Russell himself, neo-Russellians maintain that
singular thought is possible even for entities for which
misidentification is possible. The neo-Russellian cannot appeal to a
difference in thought contents to explain cases of rational
misidentification, as the distinctive claim of the neo-Russellian is
that the thought contents are the same precisely because the object
misidentified is the same and the object exhausts the thought content.
Neo-Russellians thus need to develop a new explanation of
Frege's puzzle.



Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of neo-Russellians. The first
- what we will call *Naive Russellians* - insist
that the fundamental truth-conditions for belief attributions involve
only the objects and properties, not the way those items are
represented. According to Naive Russellians, we are wrong to think
that (1) (i.e., 'Lois believes that Superman is strong')
is true and (4) (i.e., 'Lois believes that Clark Kent is
strong') is false. They are composed in the same way from
elements with the same semantic contents. Proponents of this view
include Bealer 1982, SS39; Berg 1983; Braun 1998, 2000, 2001a,b;
McKay 1981, 1991; Nelson 2002, 2005; Reddam 1982; Richard 1983, 1987;
Salmon 1986, 1989, 1995a; Soames 1987, 1989, 1995; and Tye 1978, for
example. (Bealer has changed his view; see his 1993. Richard has also
changed his view in 1989 and has subsequently become one of the most
effective critics of Naive Russellianism. We discuss Richard's
later view below in
 Section 6.
 Tye seems to have abandoned Naive Russellianism. Soames has also
altered his view, although much less drastically than the other three,
in his 2002.) The other version of neo-Russellianism, to be discussed
below in
 Section 6,
 agrees with the Fregean about the truth-values of (1) and (4) but
rejects the Fregean claim that this difference requires a difference
in thought content. While (1) is true and (4) is false, proponents of
this version of the view accept, that is not because they report
attitudinal relations to different propositions; the proposition that
Superman is strong just is, as all neo-Russellians insist, the
proposition that Clark Kent is strong.



Many Naive Russellians (Bealer, Berg, McKay, Nelson, Reddam, Richard,
Salmon, Soames, and Tye, for example) attempt to explain why people
wrongly judge that (1) is true and (4) is false by appeal to the
different pragmatic implicatures utterances of those sentences
typically generate. Other Naive Russellians (Braun) do not. We shall
discuss both versions of Naive Russellianism in what follows.



In communicating with one another, we have responsibilities that go
beyond just avoiding falsehood. For example, it is true but
inappropriate to utter the sentence 'John is sober today'
if one knows that John is always sober. Uttering that sentence is
misleading because it suggests a contrast where there is none. But
that doesn't make it false. Someone who claims that the sentence
is false is confounding pragmatics with semantics. What the sentence
says, as used on that occasion, is true, but uttering the sentence
pragmatically implicates something false: Namely, that John is at
least sometimes drunk. According to proponents of the first version of
Naive Russellianism, confounding pragmatic responsibilities with our
responsibility to avoid falsehood can lead people astray concerning
the fundamental semantics of belief attribution. There are often
responsibilities for indicating the way in which the believer
represents the individuals that her beliefs are about, but these go
beyond the truth-conditions of the attributions. Any additional
responsibilities are pragmatic, not semantic, requirements on the
speaker. They may be conditions that a speaker must ordinarily fulfill
when making a belief attribution. But these conditions stem not from
the information semantically encoded by a given utterance of a
propositional attitude reporting sentence but instead from the
information pragmatically implicated by those utterances.



The Naive Russellian says that (4) is true (given that (1) is true and
(1) and (4) say the same thing). But an utterance of (4) may
nonetheless be very misleading and impart something false. Although
Lois believes that Clark Kent is strong, she would not accept the
sentence 'Clark Kent is strong'. According to the
pragmatic explanation of why people wrongly intuit that (4) is false,
it is based on a confusion of semantics with pragmatics, as a typical
utterance of (4) does pragmatically implicate something false. On this
view, then, (4) is a true but misleading report of a belief Lois does
indeed have. Let's call this the *standard Naive Russellian
view*.



We can make this proposal more precise by articulating a metaphysics
of belief encapsulated in John Perry's distinction between
*what* an agent believes and *how* she believes it. (See
Perry 1977 for an early presentation of the distinction, where he
characterized the distinction as one between *thoughts* and
*senses*, and his 1979, where he characterized the distinction
as one between *belief contents* and *belief states*,
1980, 1990, 1997, and 1998 for a fuller presentation. It should be
noted that Perry himself is not a Naive Russellian, although he is a
neo-Russellian. In his early papers, he simply left it undetermined
whether or not sentences like (4) and (1) say the same thing, although
Stalnaker claims that Perry claimed in personal communication that he
intended his proposal to be equivalent to the Naive Russellian
proposal; see note 11 of Stalnaker 1981. In later work, in particular
his 1989, co-authored with Crimmins, Perry explicitly says that (1)
and (4) have different truth values. We discuss Crimmins and
Perry's later view below in
 Section 6.)
 Perry argued against Frege's solution to Frege's puzzle
by considering indexicals in propositional attitude reporting
sentences. His attack is based upon the Fregean's identification
of belief contents with belief states. Perry argued that we can
adequately account for indexicals in attitudes only when we
distinguish these two aspect of acts of thinking and recognize that
they can vary independently. Perry claimed that what one believes is a
function of the belief states and environment one is in. We can
believe different contents in different environments by being in the
same belief state and we can believe the same content in different
environments by being in the different belief states. So, for example,
you and I are in the same belief states when we utter 'I am
hungry' and yet, because of differences in our environments
- namely, because I am me and you are you - our belief
contents would be different. These differences in environment do not
need to be conceptualized by the agent to make a difference to her
cognitive states. You can think what I think when I say to myself
'I am hungry' by pointing to me and saying to yourself
'He is hungry'. In his 1977 Perry identified belief states
(what he there called *senses*) with what he called
*roles* and what Kaplan called *character*. In later
work (see in particular his 1980), Perry gives this identification up
and individuates belief states in terms of their narrow functional
role.



Utterances of belief reporting sentences pragmatically implicate
information about how the agent believes what she believes -
they pragmatically implicate information about the type of belief
state the agent is in - but semantically encode only information
about what is believed. An utterance of (4) will typically
pragmatically implicate false information about the type of belief
state by which Lois grasps (and takes a positive attitude towards) the
singular proposition concerning Clark Kent to the effect that he is
strong; namely, it implicates that that belief state is linked to the
sentence 'Clark Kent is strong'. An utterance of (1), on
the other hand, implicates the information that that belief state is
linked to the sentence 'Superman is strong'. This
difference in implicating potential accounts for our intuitions that
(1) and (4) convey different information. Those intuitions rightly
represent the fact that there is a difference in the information an
ordinary hearer will take from a typical utterance of (4) as opposed
to a typical utterance of (1), but they are wrongly taken to show that
(1) and (4) themselves thus differ in truth-value.



What can the Naive Russellian say about the two Fregean arguments
presented in section 1? They can claim that the principle of
rationality, according to which an agent is irrational just in case
she simultaneously believes a proposition and its negation, and the
Converse Disquotation principle are false. Let's see how.



Perry 1977 argues that once we accept the distinction between belief
states and belief contents, we should see that one can rationally
believe a proposition and its negation by being in
"distinct" belief states. Lois simultaneously believes
that Superman is strong and that Superman is not strong. This does not
call her rationality into question, as she believes the first
proposition by being in a belief state properly related to
'Superman is strong' and believes the second by being in a
belief state properly related to 'Clark Kent is not
strong'. Irrationality is believing a proposition and its
negation in virtue of being in the same type of state, not merely
believing a proposition and its negation.



These considerations lead the Naive Russellian to reject the following
principle that the first Fregean argument above relies upon.



> 
> **Rationality**.
>   
> 
> An agent is irrational if she believes a proposition and its negation
> at the same time.
> 



In its place, the Naive Russellian proposes the following
principle.



> 
> **Rationality\***.
>   
> 
> An agent is irrational if she believes a proposition and its negation
> in the same way at the same time.
> 



If Rationality is rejected and Rationality\* adopted in its place, then
the truth of (2) (i.e., 'Lois believes that Clark Kent is not
strong') and (4) (i.e., 'Lois believes that Clark Kent is
strong') does not entail that Lois is irrational. The truth of
(2) and (4) entails that Lois believes a proposition and its negation.
Given Rationality, this entails that Lois is irrational, which is
untenable, as Lois cannot correct her mistake through reflection
alone. But the truth of (2) and (4) do not entail that the belief
states she is in in virtue of which Lois believes a proposition and
its negation are the same type. Thus, given Rationality\*, nothing
about Lois's irrationality follows from the truth of (2) and
(4). Naive Russellianism is thus compatible with Lois's
rationality.



What about the second Fregean argument from above, which attempted to
derive (3) (i.e., 'Lois does not believe that Clark Kent is
strong') and (4) from the assumption that (5) (i.e.,
'Superman is strong') and (6) (i.e., 'Clark Kent is
strong') express the same proposition and the fact that Lois
accepts the one while rejecting the other? The Naive Russellian can
claim that we should similarly reject Converse Disquotation, according
to which, roughly, an agent does not believe a proposition insofar as
she sincerely, reflectively, and competently withholds assent from a
sentence that expresses that proposition, in favor of the following
weaker principle.



> 
> **Converse Disquotation\***
>   
> 
> If an agent A sincerely, reflectively, and competently denies or
> withholds acceptance from a sentence *s* (in a context
> *c*), then, where *p* is the proposition expressed by
> *s* in *c*, there is a way of believing *p* such
> that, under that way of believing, A does not, at the time of
> *c*, take a positive attitude towards *p*.
> 



The original Converse Disquotation principle licenses inferring that
one does not believe a given proposition from a single negative
instance. That is, if there is one way in which an agent is presented
with a proposition and rejects it, then the original Converse
Disquotation principle allows us to infer that the agent does not
believe that proposition and so that there is no way of grasping that
proposition such that the agent affirms it. Given the Perry-inspired
metaphysics of belief, however, that is implausibly strong, as it is
rather like inferring that Sally didn't walk to school from the
fact that she didn't walk to school naked.



If Converse Disquotation is rejected and Converse Disquotation\* is
adopted in its place, then Lois's acceptance patterns do not
entail the contradictory (3) and (4). Lois's acceptance of (5)
and denial of (6) entail that Lois both believes and *withholds
belief* from one and the same proposition, where withholding
belief from a proposition involves grasping a proposition in a given
way and taking a negative attitude towards it when so presented.
Whereas simultaneously believing and not believing a single
proposition is impossible, simultaneously believing and withholding
belief from a single proposition is not. (This intermediate state
between believing and not believing was first uncovered in Kaplan
1969. See also Salmon 1995a.)



As indicated above, Braun follows the standard Naive Russellian in
insisting that (1) and (4) say the same thing, but he departs from his
fellow Naive Russellians by refusing to appeal to differences in the
pragmatic potential of (1) and (4) in accounting for our "Frege
intuitions." He doubts such appeals are successful because he
doubts that ordinary users of propositional attitude ascribing
sentences have the necessary sophistication to impart information
about how an agent believes what she believes. (Saul, in her 1998,
1999a,b, also doubts that the sort of information described above
concerning belief states or how an agent believes what she believes
could be pragmatically implicate, or indeed communicated in any way,
by typical utterances of propositional attitude reporting sentences.
She does not, however, offer Braun's positive account.) He
agrees that there is a difference in implicature-potential between the
unembedded sentences (5) and (6) and he argues that this difference
itself will account for our intuitions regarding the difference in
truth-value between typical utterances of (1) and (4). There is no
need, he argues, to go on and insist that typical utterances of (1)
and (4) convey in any way information about how Lois believes what she
believes. (See Braun 1998.) In subsequent papers Braun offers rich and
interesting accounts of the role propositional attitude ascribing
sentences play in explaining, predicting, and rationalizing behavior.
(See Braun 2000, 2001a,b.) 


## 5. Problems for the Naive Russellian theory



Naive Russellianism faces several problems. In this section we shall
offer a quick overview of some of the main problems and gesture
towards possible solutions.



**Pragmatic principles**. If the Naive Russellian wishes
to give a pragmatic account of people's ordinary judgments about
the differing truth-values of (1) and (4), she must clearly identify
the pragmatic principles that make these incorrect judgments so
pervasive. (Note: This problem will not face Braun's version of
Naive Russellianism in quite the same way.)



H.P. Grice, the father of pragmatic implicatures, offered a very
compelling theory of conversational implicatures. (See Grice 1975,
1978, 1981. See also the entry on
 implicature.)
 But it is unlikely to help the Naive Russellian. Information about
the way the believer believes what she believes cannot, it would seem,
be carried as a conversational implicature because such information is
not calculable *by the conversational participants* from what
is said and the maxims, as Grice's theory requires
conversational implicatures to be. After all, that would require that,
at some level, ordinary speakers realize that they are not saying all
they mean when they utter, under "ordinary circumstances,"
a sentence like (1). But that is implausible. (Schiffer, in his 1987,
levels a similar charge, although he does not explicitly present it in
terms of Grice's calculability condition; Salmon responds in his
1989. See also Recanati 1993, chapter 17.)



Obvious permutations on Grice's notion of conversational
implicature, like Morgan's and Horn & Bayer's notion
of short-circuited conversational implicatures, won't be of much
use either. (See Morgan 1978 and Horn & Bayer 1984.)
Short-circuiting occurs when a nonliteral use becomes standardized.
For example, it is at least arguable that uses of 'Can you pass
the salt?', to take an example from Searle 1975, are standardly
requests for salt. According to Morgan and Horn and Bayer, this meant
information is a conversational implicature. Ordinary speakers may not
recognize, even upon reflection, that they are speaking nonliterally
because that nonliteral use has become conventionalized through
repetition. And even though 'Do you have the ability to pass the
salt?' and 'Can you pass the salt?' (at least
arguably) mean the same thing and hence utterances of them have the
same *conversational implicating potential*, because of past
uses an utterance of the latter but not the former will naturally give
rise to the request for the salt. Short-circuiting is unlikely to be
of use to a Naive Russellian because it requires past uses that meet
the conditions for ordinary conversational implicature, those uses of
which then become, through repetition, standardized. Those past uses,
however, must pass the calculability condition, as they were ordinary
conversational implicatures. But it is doubtful that there were at any
time widespread uses of propositional attitude reporting sentences
that met the necessary conditions for being conversational
implicatures, as it is highly dubious that ordinary speakers ever
realized that sentences like (1) and (4) say the same thing. Hence,
there was never the necessary past use as a standard conversational
implicature that could have become standardized.



We have argued that a proponent of (the standard version of) Naive
Russellianism cannot employ Grice's notion of conversational
implicature, or any obvious permutation thereof, to account for our
Frege intuitions. What the Naive Russellian needs is a notion of a
pragmatic implicature that does not rely upon calculability and does
not require the propositions semantically encoded by the relevant
utterances to play a role in the conscious psychological lives of the
participants of the conversation. How could an implicature be
generated under such conditions? The following is a suggestion.



There is a widespread conflation of belief contents and belief states.
Because ordinary folk do not clearly distinguish these two notions, it
possible for them to use propositional attitude verbs that express a
relation to belief contents intending also to impart information about
the belief states of the subject of the report without realizing that
they are speaking nonliterally. As information concerning belief
states is useful in explaining, predicting, and rationalizing actions
- something propositional attitude reporting sentences seem made
to do - and belief contents and belief states are not clearly
distinguished, ordinary speakers unwittingly come to use such
sentences to convey more than they express.



> 
> 
> **Asymmetric relations**. If names are
> inter-substitutable, and if (12) is true 
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > (12) Lois believes that Superman is stronger than Clark Kent.
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> then (13) and (14) must also be true.
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > (13) Lois believes that Superman is stronger than Superman.
> >   
> > 
> > (14) Lois believes that Clark Kent is stronger than Superman.
> > 
> 
> 
> 



Can it really be that (13) and (14) are true and that the typical
strong feeling that they are false is really just a matter of
pragmatic inappropriateness? The Naive Russellian seems to have little
choice but to offer a positive answer. 



If (13) is true, then is it also true that Lois believes that Superman
is stronger than himself, or can we differentiate this from the
previous claims? Maybe we can get ourselves to accept that Lois
rationally believes that Superman is stronger than Superman. But how
could a thoughtful agent believe that something is stronger than
itself? Surely that is a violation of the requirements of
rationality.



Regarding this last problem, Salmon 1992 and McKay 1991 compellingly
argue that believing that Superman is stronger than Superman is
distinct from believing that Superman is stronger than himself because
the proposition that Superman is stronger than Superman is different
from the proposition that Superman is stronger than himself, on the
grounds that *being stronger than Superman* is a different
property from *being stronger than oneself*. The first is a
two-place relation, with the identity pair <SUPERMAN, SUPERMAN>
as relata; the second is a one-place, self-reflexive property. (For
more on the difference between xRy and xRx, under an assignment of the
same object to both variables x and y, see Fine 2007 



**Psychological explanation, predication, and
rationalization**. The explanatory, predictive, and
rationalizing potential of (1) differs from that of (4). For example,
an utterance of (4), if accepted as true, would typically lead one to
expect that, when Lois is looking for some heavy boxes to be moved in
her office, sees Clark Kent (dressed in his *Daily Planet*
garb) standing by doing nothing, she would ask him to help, etc..
This, of course, is the wrong result. Lois does no such thing. The
Naive Russellian thinks that an utterance of (4) is true in exactly
those conditions under which an utterance of (1) is true. But this, it
may be thought, is hard to square with the fact that they have such
very different explanatory, predictive, and rationalizing potential.
(See Richard 1997 for a powerful presentation of this objection.)



The force of this objection rests on the first problem of pragmatic
principles raised above. For if that problem is solved, then the
solution to the problems of psychological explanation, predication,
and rationalization will follow on its wings. Insofar as utterances of
(1) and (4) implicate different information about the way in which
Lois believes what she allegedly believes, it seems likely that there
will be a very natural account of the difference in their explanatory,
predictive, and rationalizing potential, the difference in what is
pragmatically implicated will account for the differences noted in
this section. So the more fundamental problem facing the Naive
Russellian is the problem of pragmatic principles.



**Schiffer's iteration problem**. In his 1987,
2006, Schiffer argues that Naive Russellianism is implausible when it
comes to beliefs about other people's beliefs. Lois, the Naive
Russellian claims, is rational in believing a contradiction because
she has two modes of presentation of Superman such that she does not
believe that they are modes of presentation of the same object. So,
Lois can rationally believe the singular propositions that Superman is
strong and that Superman is not strong at the same time because she
believes the first in one way and the second in another way. But most
of us believe that Lois believes that Superman is strong while
believing that Lois does not believe that Clark Kent is strong. So,
given Naive Russellianism, most of us then believe a proposition and
its negation and we seem to not be guilty of irrationality for so
doing. But, argues Schiffer, the Naive Russellian cannot account for
this, as most of us do not have two distinct ways of thinking of
Superman (or Lois, for that matter) such that we do not realize that
they are ways of thinking of the same individual, as most of us are
not ignorant of the identity between Superman and Clark Kent. So, it
seems that the Naive Russellian's conditions for rationally
believing a proposition and its negation are not met. (Salmon 1989,
2006 contains responses to Schiffer's objection. See also Braun
2006.)


## 6. Contextualist theories



Many are reluctant to accept the claim that co-referring proper names
are intersubstitutable within the scope of attitude verbs, even when
they are attracted to the thesis of direct reference and the idea that
the contents of some of our attitudes are nothing but singular
propositions. Thus, many neo-Russellians reject Naive Russellianism.
They would like to accept the intuitions that (1) is true and (4) is
false while denying the Fregean claims that 'Superman' and
'Clark Kent' are not directly referential and that all
cases of identity confusion are to be explained in terms of a
difference in thought grasped. They want it all. (5) and (6) express
the same singular proposition, but (1) is true and (4) is false. While
Naive Russellians claim that the information regarding how Lois
believes what she does is, at best, merely part of what utterances of
(1) and (4) pragmatically convey, "sophisticated"
neo-Russellians would like that information to be part of the semantic
content of the sentences in question. In this section we look at two
broad strategies that promise to deliver these results: The first
developed in Mark Crimmins and John Perry 1989 and Crimmins 1992a and
the second suggested by a view presented in Mark Richard 1990.



Crimmins and Perry argue that propositional attitude reports involve
"unarticulated constituents" that concern how the subject
of the report conceives of the proposition that the report alleges
that she has an attitude towards. According to Crimmins and Perry, a
typical utterance of (1) expresses a truth while a typical utterance
of (4) expresses a falsehood. Both attributions, they claim, say of
Lois that she believes the singular proposition about Superman to the
effect that he is strong. But the first involves implicit reference to
Lois's "Superman-y" way of thinking of Superman and
the second to Lois's "Clark Kent-y" way of thinking
of Superman. Because Lois believes that singular proposition in the
first way and not the second, the two sentences will typically express
different propositions that can diverge in truth-value.



Crimmins and Perry embrace a metaphysics of thoughts and thinking
similar to the standard Naive Russellian's described above in
the previous section. The difference between the views concerns
whether or not the information semantically encoded by utterances of
attitude reporting sentences is sensitive or insensitive to
differences in the way a proposition is grasped.



Extra-linguistic context determines what way of grasping (what
Crimmins and Perry call an *idea*) an utterance of a
propositional attitude ascribing sentence makes implicit reference to.
(On the most plausible version of the view, a type of way of grasping,
instead of a token way of grasping, that is implicitly referred to.)
The expressions themselves (and not just their referents or semantic
contents) are, however, typically relevant to what way of grasping is
implicitly referred to. So, although substitution of co-referring
names does not affect the proposition the propositional attitude
ascribing sentence claims the target of the report to have an attitude
towards, as it does on the Fregean view, in some cases it affects what
way of grasping is implicitly referred to and hence is capable of
affecting truth-value of a propositional attitude ascribing sentence.
(Some call views of this kind "hidden-indexical theories"
because the sentence does not contain a syntactic element that
explicitly refers to a way of thinking. See Schiffer 1992, p. 503.
Schiffer offered a version of this view in his 1977, as did Brian Loar
1972. Greg Fitch also presented a similar view in his 1984 and 1987.
We focus on Crimmins and Perry's version, which is the most
fully developed version of the view.)



Crimmins and Perry offer a way of insisting that the objects of many
of our attitudes are singular propositions while still denying the
substitution principle. They can thus accept all of the auxiliary
principles and claims used to generate Frege's puzzle (i.e.,
Disquotation, Converse Disquotation, the principle of Rationality,
etc.) and, like Frege, deny that the co-reference of
'Superman' and 'Clark Kent' licenses their
inter-substitution in (1), while still claiming that
'Superman', as it occurs in (1), and 'Clark
Kent', as it occurs in (2), are directly referential. The view
seems to give us all that we could want: It respects our Fregean
intuitions about truth-values without the sins of accepting a
sense/reference distinction for singular terms like proper names,
demonstratives, and indexicals. (The view is further developed and
refined in Crimmins 1992a,b and 1993.)



Crimmins and Perry's view has been subject to criticism. We
shall here briefly present only one line of objection. (See Bach 1993,
Clapp 1995, Reimer 1995, Richard 1993, Rieber 1995, and Saul 1992.
Crimmins responds to some of these objections in his 1992a, 1995a.
Schiffer objects to Crimmins and Perry's view in his 1992 and
1994 on the basis that 'believes' and other propositional
attitude verbs do not express three-place relations, as their view
requires. Ludlow responds to Schiffer's "logical
form" objection in his 1995, 1996. Schiffer responds to Ludlow
in his 1996.)



Many are attracted to the claim that contextual supplementation of
what's said is always traceable to some syntactic element; that
is, the information semantically encoded by an utterance must have the
same structure as the syntactic form of the sentence uttered. Call
this the *the principle of linguistic constraint*. (See, for
example, Stanley 2000, 2002 for a defense of this constraint. Recanati
2002 and Carston 1998, 2002, 2016 offer very sensitive defenses of
unarticulated constituents.) One reason to accept this principle is
that it helps to demarcate information that is conveyed by an
utterance but not part of what is said by the sentence uttered. And it
does this in a way that solves an overgeneration problem that
threatens theories violating this constraint. Perhaps one can, given
the correct conversational setting, using the sentence
'2+2=4' to communicate that one is going to the store.
Even still, it seems plausible that the sentence itself does not say
that, as nothing in the sentence contributes the relevant components
of that communicated piece of information. Crimmins and Perry's
view is inconsistent with this principle, as they argue that
'believes' is syntactically two-place even though it
expresses a three-place relation. So, anyone convinced that our
semantic theories should be syntactically constrained will reject
Crimmins and Perry's view.



Is there a way to make the information encoded by utterances of belief
sentences sensitive to how the subjects of the reports grasp the
propositions, while insisting that the propositions grasped are
singular propositions, without making ways of grasping unarticulated
constituents? We can get an idea of how to do this by looking at a
view developed by Mark Richard 1990, 1993, 1995. Like Crimmins and
Perry, Richard offers a semantics of propositional attitude reporting
sentences that treats them as context-sensitive, respects something
like neo-Russellianism (although we'll return to this below),
and yet blocks intersubstitution of co-referring names within the
scope of propositional attitude verbs. Unlike Crimmins and Perry,
however, Richard does not claim that 'believes' (and its
fellow propositional attitude verbs) expresses a three-place relation
and does not appeal to unarticulated constituents. Richard's
view is thus consistent with the principle of linguistic constraint.
The key to Richard's view is his claim that propositional
attitude verbs are context-sensitive, expressing different two-place
relations in different contexts.



According to Richard, sentences express what he calls *Russellian
Annotated Matrices* (RAMs). These are represented as tuples of
pairs of linguistic expressions and their "Russellian
interpretations." (Richard notes that strictly speaking we
don't want a linguistic expression but rather some kind of
internal representation to deal with cases like Kripke's
Paderweski case. See the discussion below in
 Section 8.)
 The pairs are called *annotations*. RAMs serve as both the
semantic contents of sentences and the contents of beliefs. According
to Richard's account, (1), for example, is true relative to some
context *c* and a world of evaluation *w* just in case
Lois has a thought in *w* that is properly represented
(relative to the standards in effect in *c*) by the sentence
'Superman is strong'. The conversational setting generates
restrictions on what words and sentences are proper translations of
the representations of the alleged believer. Richard calls these
*restrictions on correlation functions*. Correlation functions
map annotations (used by the belief reporter) onto (sets of)
annotations (employed in the alleged believer's beliefs). The
sentence 'Superman is strong' *properly represents*
some thought *p* of Lois's (relative to the restrictions
in force in some context *c*) just in case a correlation
function maps the RAM expressed by 'Superman is strong' to
*p* that respects the relevant restrictions in force in
*c*. Now, as there are contexts (and indeed, ordinary contexts
will be just like this) in which 'Superman is strong' and
'Clark Kent is strong' are associated with different
restrictions, we cannot substitute 'Clark Kent' for
'Superman' in (1) and preserve truth. Lois may well have a
thought that can be appropriately represented, given the restrictions
in the place in the context, by the first sentence but not the second.
So, there is no problem in saying that (1) is true while (4) is
false. (One of the distinctive differences between Richard and
Crimmins concerns the specifications of the internal
representations. Roughly, Richard thinks that a correct report only
describes or "matches" the target mental representational of the
subject, while Crimmins claim that a reporter refers to the mental
representation. For more, see Crimmins 1995b and Richard 1993a.)



Richard's view is not a version of neo-Russellianism. This is
because, on his view, the contents of propositional attitudes are not
singular propositions. Instead, the content of the belief that
Superman is strong, for example, contains the pair of Superman himself
and something that plays the role of a mode of presentation -
the annotation. But Richard's view can be altered in such a way
as to still retain its core features while being neo-Russellian,
treating the contents of propositional attitudes and the contents of
sentences containing proper names as singular propositions. The
resulting view is in many ways superior to Richard's view. Begin
by assuming the Perry-inspired metaphysics of thought sketched
earlier, in which we distinguish thought contents from thought states.
We can then conceive of Richardian correlation functions as maps from
complement clauses to thought states, preserving content. The content
of both (5) and (6) is the singular proposition that Superman flies.
Lois believes that proposition in virtue of being in a belief state
related to 'Superman flies' but not 'Clark Kent
flies'. So, in a belief ascribing context in which the
complement clauses are intended to represent the way by which the
agent believes what she is claimed to believe, (1) is true and (4) is
false. We can then have a neo-Russellian theory of the contents of the
attitudes and semantics of singular terms like proper names,
indexicals, and demonstratives that respects Fregean intuitions about
the truth-values of (1)-(4) and is free of a commitment to
unarticulated constituents. The view promises to offer a more
plausible account of when two agents "believe the same
thing," which Richard's own fine-grained account of the
contents of attitudes cannot, as our intuitions about when two agents
count as believing the same thing are often insensitive to difference
in how agents believe what they believe. Such an account seems to be
the most promising way to count (1) true and (4) false.



Both Richard's account and the modified neo-Russellian version
of that account sketched above face a serious problem: The problem of
conflicting restrictions. (See Sider 1995 and Soames 1995.) To build
up to the objection, consider cases in which a speaker is ascribing
beliefs to different agents. It may be common ground that those agents
conceive of matters differently. In such a case, the speaker may
intend the same complement clause to represent different types of
belief states for different agents. Consider the following case as an
example. Suppose that Bob and Susan are looking at a picture of Bill
Clinton. Bob might then use the complement clause 'that he
[pointing at the picture] was president' to represent a
first-person belief state when ascribing beliefs to Bill Clinton and a
different type of belief state, certainly not a first-person belief
state, when ascribing beliefs to George Bush. After all, we can
imagine Frege-style cases in which the type of belief state Bob
intends to specify might be essential to the point of his speech.



We can now move to the problem of conflicting restrictions. Suppose
now that the ascriber is confused about the identities of the subject
of the report. So, for example, suppose Lois is ascribing beliefs to
Superman and Clark Kent. Because she believes that Superman is not
Clark Kent, she takes herself to be ascribing beliefs to two different
people, depending on how she conceives of Superman. But then we can
imagine circumstances, similar to the ones with Bob and Susan
described above, in which her intentions generate conflicting
restrictions on a single complement clause. So, for example, Lois
might intend 'he', pointing at a picture of Lex Luthor, in
'that he is evil' to represent a visual/perceptual
demonstrative when ascribing beliefs to Superman and a
nondemonstrative, great-deeds conception of Luthor when ascribing
beliefs to Clark Kent. (Suppose that Lois believes that Superman knows
of Lex Luthor personally, from his interactions with him, whereas
Clark Kent only knows about Lex Luthor through newspaper reports and
the testimony of others.) So, when Lois says, "Superman believes
that he [pointing at the picture of Luthor] is evil," she
intends to convey that Superman has a belief to the effect that he
[visual presentation of Luthor] is evil and when she says,
"Clark Kent believes that he [pointing at the picture of Luthor]
is evil," she intends to convey that Clark Kent has a belief to
the effect that such-and-so criminal mastermind is evil. This is
problematic for Richard because these restrictions conflict and so
there is no correlation function that respects all the operative
restrictions. As a result, any belief attribution Lois might make in
such a conversational setting to Superman/Clark Kent with a complement
clause containing 'he [visual presentation of Luthor]' as
subject is false. Even 'Superman believes that he [visual
presentation of Luthor] is self-identical' is false. This is
intuitively unacceptable. Although Lois is confused, she can
intuitively still say a few true things about Superman's beliefs
concerning Lex Luthor.



Richard responds to this problem in his 1995 by claiming that when
there are conflicting restrictions operative in a context, a relevant
sentence is true in the context just in case it is true on every
resolution of the conflict. Nelson 2002, 2005 criticizes
Richard's response, arguing that it still does not accommodate
all intuitive truth-value judgments, as it still counts false some
utterances that are intuitively true.



Both Crimmins and Perry's account and Richard's account
have a similar goal: Accept the intuitive judgments of the truth-value
of sentences like (1)-(4) without accepting the Fregean claim that the
belief that Superman is strong is distinct from the belief that Clark
Kent is strong. We have, however, seen reasons to doubt that either
succeeds in realizing this goal.


## 7. Denying the assumption of structured-propositionalism



All of the accounts considered above - both Frege's
account, the neo-Fregean accounts, and the various versions of
neo-Russellianism, from Naive Russellianism to Crimmins and
Perry's view and Richard's view - share a common
assumption of *structured-propositionalism*, according to which
the objects of thought are propositions, which are public,
language-independent, abstract entities with a structure that mirrors,
to some degree, the syntactic structure of the natural language
sentences that express them. This assumption is very widely, although
not universally, made by contemporary philosophers of language and
mind. But many have found propositionalism problematic. There are a
host of problems that have been raised, some ontological, some purely
semantic. For example, some have found propositions to be unduly
mysterious objects, having no place in a naturalistic world. Sometimes
this is part of a general rejection of abstract entities and other
times a rejection of intensional entities in particular. Others have
found propositions to lack acceptable individuation conditions. And
others have been moved by the so-called *unity problem* that
ultimately led Russell to abandon propositions as the contents of the
attitudes in favor of his multiple judgment theory. Finally, some have
thought that the propositionalist assumption stands in the way of an
acceptable solution to Frege's puzzle.



In this section we survey accounts that deny
structured-propositionalism. There are two broad categories of such
theories: The first denies propositionalism, according to which
propositions are the objects of the attitudes. The most natural,
although not the only, way to deny propositionalism is to embrace some
form of *sententialism*, according to which belief attributions
relate a person to some kind of linguistic entity. The second accepts
a commitment to the propositionalist's claim that the objects of
thought are public, language-independent, abstract entities, but
denies that these entities are structured. The most natural, although,
again, not the only, way to deny *structure* is to identify
sets of possible worlds, or functions from worlds to truth values,
with the objects of thought. We shall consider sententialism and the
denial of structure in turn.



First sententialism. The simplest form of sententialism, roughly
inspired by Rudolph Carnap's analysis of belief sentences,
claims that what we have been calling "propositional
attitudes" are really attitudes towards sentences. (See, for
example, Carnap 1947 [1958]. Quine too was a proponent of this view.
See, for example, his 1956.) On this view, (1) is analyzed as
(15),



> 
> (15) Lois believes-true 'Superman is strong'
> 



where 'believes-true' expresses a primitive relation
between an agent and a sentence. (Similar relations will have to be
introduced to correspond to 'hopes-true',
'desires-true', etc..)



This proposal obviously won't do. As Church famously pointed out
(see Church 1943, p. 45), construing propositional attitude verbs as
relating agents to sentences seems to require that the agent in
question understands the language used in the report. Suppose that
Lois is a monolingual German speaker, but that everything else about
the Superman stories is the same. Then we'd still be inclined to
count (1) as true. But (15), which is proposed to analyze (1), is
obviously false, as Lois bears no relation whatsoever to the English
sentence 'Superman is strong'.



Proponents of sententialism are well aware of the problem. But it is
much less obvious that they have succeeded in solving it. Carnap (see
Carnap 1947 [1958], supplement C) responds to Church's objection
by claiming that the proposal need not require that the agent
believe-true the very sentence contained in the complement clause, but
only some sentence or other that bears some relation (Carnap calls it
'*B*') to the sentence the ascriber uses. But this
relation can't simply be left unanalyzed. And one cannot analyze
it in terms of believing-true a sentence that expressing the same
proposition or worse still believing the proposition expressed by the
embedded sentence, on pains of reverting to the thesis of
propositionalism that the theory was designed to avoid.



It seems plausible that some non-language-using animals have
propositional attitudes or at least that some attitude ascribing
sentences about non-language-using animals are true. For example, it
seems that the dog wants to go out when she scratches at the door and
that the cat believes food is on its way when she hears the can being
opened and comes rushing in to eat. But it seems implausible to
analyze these cases in terms of these creatures being related to
sentences, as nonhuman animals almost certainly do not believe true
sentences.



Quine famously responded to this problem by writing: "We may
treat a mouse's fear of a cat as his fearing true a certain
English sentence. This is unnatural without being therefore wrong. It
is a little like describing a prehistoric ocean current as
clockwise" (1956, p. 186). Although an excellent turn of the
pen, it seems clear that the worry is in no way answered. Ascribing a
clockwise current to a prehistoric ocean does not require the
existence of clocks in prehistoric time, any more than our using
actual resources to describe a counterfactual circumstance in which,
say, there are no words requires that there are words in that
counterfactual circumstance. But this is a false comparison to the
case of treating a mouse's fear of a cat as fearing true an
English sentence when one is certain the mouse doesn't
understand English. In the case of non-language-using animals we
aren't using features of context to fix a content that we then
evaluate at contexts without those features, as we are in the kinds of
cases Quine draws our attention to. It is still hard to see how a
mouse can fear- or believe-true any sentences, English or otherwise,
even though it can fear a cat and believe that it is dangerous.



Donald Davidson 1968 proposed a more complex version of sententialism.
Although his account was first proposed as an account of indirect
discourse (i.e., of sentences like 'Bill said that the
proposition won't pass'), it has been extended to a
general theory of propositional attitudes. (Davidson himself hinted at
such in extension in the opening paragraph of his original paper.) We
begin with indirect speech reports. Roughly, Davidson claims that a
sentence like (16) has as its true logical form (17) below.



> 
> (16) Galileo said that the earth moves.
> 
> 
> (17) Galileo said that. The earth moves.
> 
> 
> 



Davidson's idea is that 'that' in (16) functions as
a demonstrative that refers to the utterance of the sentence that
follows. So an utterance of (16) is really an utterance of two
sentences, one with a demonstrative that then refers to the utterance
that follows. Galileo need not have uttered the exact sentence
demonstratively referred to for an utterance of (16) to be true.
Instead, he must have uttered a sentence that "samesays"
the utterance demonstratively referred to. So the account may seem to
hold the promise of overcoming Church's translation argument.
This is called the *paratactic account* of indirect speech
reports.



Extending the paratactic account of indirect speech reports to
propositional attitude reports more generally may seem
straightforward. (1) is claimed to have the logical form of (18)
below.



> 
> (18) Lois believes that. Superman is strong.
> 



An utterance of (1) is then seen to assert of Lois that she has a
belief whose content is captured by the ascriber's utterance of
the sentence 'Superman is strong'.



The truth of (1) plus the true identity statement 'Superman is
Clark Kent' is compatible with (4)'s falsity. This is
because (18) plus the true identity statement does not entail (19)
below.



> 
> (19) Lois believes that. Clark Kent is strong.
> 



The two occurrences of 'that' in (18) and (19) do not
refer to the same utterance and so there is no guarantee that the two
utterances samesay the same things. So, the account respects the
intuitive truth-value judgments of (1)-(4).



The paratactic account, both solely as an account of indirect speech
reports and as an account of propositional attitude reports more
generally, has been subject to a wide range of criticisms. (For a
sampling, see Bigelow 1980, Blackburn 1975, Burge 1986, Clapp 2002,
McFetridge 1980, Rumfitt 1993, and especially Schiffer 1987b, pp.
122-38. See Lepore and Loewer 1989 for a defense.) First, there
are languages where the apparent complementizer -
'that', in English - is not homophonic with a
demonstrative. How deep this problem is depends on how seriously the
paratactic account is about taking surface syntactic form as some kind
of guide. One might claim that 'believes' (and its
fellows) express a two place relation between an agent and some kind
of utterance-like entity, where the embedded sentence functions as a
representer of the utterance-like entity that the agent in question
bears the relation to. There is no need, at least not without other
assumptions, that the apparent complementizer itself function as a
demonstrative. And even if there is a need for the complementizer
itself to *function* as a demonstrative, there is no need for
it to *be* a demonstrative.



Second, and we think far more telling, there are entailment relations
that are intuitively valid that the account counts as invalid and for
precisely the same reasons that it counts invalid the intuitively
offending entailments involved in Frege cases. Recall how the account
invalidates substitution of co-referring names within the scope of
'believes' sketched above. The same kind of reasoning
will, it seems, also lead one to think that the following is
invalid.



> 
> (A) Lois believes that. Superman is strong.
> 
> 
> So, (B) Lois believes that. Superman is strong.
> 
> 
> 



Just as the two occurrences of 'that' in (15) and (16)
refer to different utterances, so too the different occurrences of
'that' in (A) and (B) refer to different utterances. But
something has evidently gone wrong if (A) does not entail (B). (This
argument mirrors Kaplan's argument the claim that the primary
bearers of semantic contents are sentences-in-context, as opposed to
utterances, which are concrete events. See Kaplan 1977.) This problem
can be avoided if, following Rumfitt 1993, utterance-types as opposed
to utterance-tokens are seen to be the referent of
'that'.



But there are other entailment relations that are also problematic for
the paratactic account and are not avoided by Rumfitt's move.
(Similar points are made by Burge 1986 and Schiffer 1987b.)
Intuitively, (1) entails (20).



> 
> (20) There is something that Lois believes.
> 



And consider the following entailment relations.



> 
> (C) Superman said something funny.
>   
> 
> (D) Lois believes what Superman said.
>   
> 
> So, (E) Lois believes something funny.
> 



and 



> 
> (1) Lois believes that Superman is strong.
>   
> 
> (F) Superman exists.
>   
> 
> So, (G) There is someone such that Lois believes that he is strong.
> 



All of these are invalid if they are analyzed according to the
paratactic analysis, whereas they are intuitively valid. This is
strong evidence against the paratactic analysis, especially as that
account is designed to respect our intuitive validity judgments.



Lepore and Loewer 1989 respond to these entailment problems. They try
to deal with all but the last, which concerns the relationship between
so-called *de dicto* belief and *de re* belief (see the
supplementary document, The *De Re*/*De Dicto*
Distinction, *op. cit*.), by showing how the validity of the
entailment is preserved by the addition of a premise that it is
plausible to say we simply take for granted in assessing the validity
of the entailments displayed above. The success of their strategy
depends on the plausibility of the original entailment intuitions
turning on our implicitly assuming the additional premise in
question.



There is a final problem that faces the paratactic account that we
shall briefly discuss. (See Schiffer 1987b.) The key idea behind the
paratactic view is that the utterance of the embedded sentence serves
as a surrogate for some entity that the report then asserts the
subject of the report bears some relation of samesaying to. But this
is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the proponent of the
paratactic account owes an account of when two utterances samesay one
another. And, as was the case with Carnap's proposal, this
account cannot make appeal to a proposition which both utterances bear
some relation to in virtue of which they samesay one another, on pains
of the view collapsing into a version of a propositionalist view.
Davidson thought he had such an account by treating a Tarskian theory
of truth as a theory of meaning. (See his 1967.) Although there is no
question of doing the issue justice here, Davidson's work
proposed that the primary aim of a theory of meaning is to explain
speaker competence and in particular the knowledge by which speakers
can understand a potentially infinite number of sentences. He thought
that a Tarskian truth theory did just that. Although there are still
practitioners of Davidsonian semantics, the view has been the subject
of criticism. (Foster 1976 is the ultimate source of many of these
criticisms. See Soames 1989, 1992 and chapter 12 of his 2003 for a
further critique of the view. For a defense of the strategy, see
Larson and Segal 1995.)



This problem is more pressing when one moves from indirect speech
reports to other propositional attitude reports. For, as Schiffer
1987b has stressed, whereas (16)'s truth plausibly requires the
existence of an utterance on Galileo's part, it is implausible
to insist that the truth of (1) requires an actual utterance on
Lois's part. Lois might truly be said to believe that Superman
is strong even though she has produced no utterances that samesay the
ascriber's utterance of 'Superman is strong'. So,
let '*u*'' name the ascriber's
utterance of 'The earth moves'. If (16) is true, then
there exists an utterance *u* such that Galileo produced
*u* and *u*' and *u* samesay one another.
Now let '*u*''' name the attributer's
utterance of 'Superman is strong'. The truth of (1) does
not entail that there exists an utterance *u* such that Lois
produced *u* and *u*'' and *u* samesay one
another. So, even if one can give an adequate account of when two
utterances samesay one another without presupposing a common meaning
or proposition they are both related to, one's work in defending
the paratactic account as an account of belief sentences (and other
propositional attitude reporting sentences) is not complete.



The natural move to make in response is to try to find another token
state - a belief state, for example - whose existence is
guaranteed by the truth of a sentence like (1) which can then be
thought to enter into the samesaying relation to *u*'.
This is what Lepore and Loewer 1989 suggest. But problems remain.
First, even if some beliefs involve an actual episode in the
believer's mind, say the tokening of some brain state that can
be said to samesay *u*, there are other beliefs, implicit
beliefs, for which it is implausible to insist that they are had
because of the actual existence of a token state that is capable of
entering into the samesaying relation to an utterance. You most likely
did not believe 5 minutes ago that there was a pink elephant in your
room. The view easily accommodates this fact, as it is not the case
that you were in some brain state that samesays my utterance of the
sentence 'There is an elephant in your room'. But,
precisely for the same reason, the view seems to not accommodate the
fact that you also believed that there was not an elephant in your
room. (After all, you weren't merely agnostic on the matter,
having an unsettled mind as to whether or not there is an elephant
before you.) At least prior to your reading these sentences, it seems
implausible that you were in some token belief state that samesays an
utterance of 'There is not a pink elephant in your room'.
So, implicit beliefs still seem to be a problem for this account.
Second, the view seems saddled with the same problem facing
Carnap's and Davidson's views. It is well and fine to say
that a propositional attitude report involves an utterance of an
embedded sentence which samesays something that that the subject of
the report bears the appropriate relation to. But the proponent of the
paratactic account owes an analysis of the samesaying relation that
doesn't presuppose the notion of the two tokens having a common
content, on pains of the view collapsing into a propositionalist view.
Even if one remains optimistic that a Tarskian truth theory, properly
constrained, will serve the purpose as an analysis of the meaning of
utterances and then sentences, it is far from clear that one should be
at all hopeful that a similar theory will serve the purpose of
analyzing the content of belief, desire, and other attitude states.
But then it is hard to see how the view could properly explicate the
notion of samesaying without relying on the idea that utterances and
belief states express, in some sense, propositions. And simply taking
samesaying as a primitive is to merely pretend to have eliminated
propositions from one's theory.



There is an alternative account, in the spirit of the simple
sentential accounts, first suggested by Gilbert Harman in his 1972. On
this view, the contents of the attitudes should be seen to be
*interpreted logical forms (ILFs*). The idea has been worked
out in more detail by Higginbotham 1991 and especially by Larson and
Ludlow 1993. The idea is that propositional attitude verbs express
relations between agents and ILFs, where an ILF is a syntactic tree
structured with each of its nodes "interpreted," or
assigned semantic values. Take a simple example. (21) is the ILF
associated with (5). (We assume, for simplicity, that the semantic
value of a predicate is the set of individuals that it applies
to.)




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| (5) | Superman is strong. |
| (21) |  <S, true>

<NP, Superman> <VP, Superman>

<'Superman', Superman> <'is strong',
set of strong things> |



Even though the semantic values of all the nodes of tree structures
associated with (5) and (6) are the same, their ILFs differ given the
different linguistic items 'Superman' and 'Clark
Kent'. The account thus views the contents of propositional
attitudes as hybrids of linguistic and non-linguistic items; i.e., the
expressions of the complement clauses and those expressions's
semantic values. And it promises to account for the intuitive truth of
(1)-(4) by distinguishing the proposition that Superman is strong from
the proposition that Clark Kent is strong in virtue of the difference
in linguistic items.



Clapp 2002 argues that Larson and Ludlow's account violates
Davidson's constraint that the truth condition of a sentence is
a function of the values of its constituent syntactic units and thus,
Clapp argues, the account as a whole fails to provide an account of
our semantic competence. Soames makes a similar point in his 2002, pp.
150-2, where he argues that Larson and Ludlow's account
fails when viewed as a part of the Davidsonian project of accounting
for the meanings of sentences, and thus accounting for what speakers
know in virtue of which they can understand arbitrary sentences with
which they are competent, in terms of offering a Tarskian truth theory
for the language.



There are problems facing the account that are independent of its
fitting in with the Davidsonian project. For example, Soames argues
that the very mechanisms by which Larson and Ludlow account for the
consistency of (1) and (3) - namely, by distinguishing the
proposition that Superman is strong from the proposition that Clark
Kent is strong on the grounds that the linguistic item
'Superman' is distinct from the linguistic item
'Clark Kent' - proves problematic for other cases in
which we are inclined to think that differences in the linguistic
items in the complement clauses cannot lead to a difference in
truth-value. One example is an application of Church's
translation argument. If (1) is true, then a faithful translation of
(1) into Spanish should preserve truth, leaving the names
untranslated.



> 
> (22) Lois cree que Superman es fuerte
> 



The ILF associated with 'Superman es fuerte' is different
from the ILF associated with (5), just as the ILF associated with (5)
is different from the ILF associated with (6). If the core of the
explanation of why (1) and (3) are consistent and, more generally, why
substitution fails in the case of co-referring proper names, is that
the substitution alters the ILF associated with the complement clause,
then it would seem that the above translation, for the very same
reason, should not be guaranteed to preserve truth. But it intuitively
does. 



Larson and Ludlow are aware of this problem, considering it in SS7
of their paper. They suggest two strategies. First they suggest
altering the account so that the truth of (1) does guarantee the truth
of (22). This is well and good, but it has to be done in such a way
that we don't lose our explanation of why (1) and (3) are
consistent and why (1) doesn't entail (4). Larson and Ludlow do
not tell us how to thread that needle. Second, they consider admitting
that (1) does not entail (22) and seeking to explain why (1) and (22)
can nonetheless be used to report the same attitude by an auxiliary
account. Again, this is well and good, but then they owe us an
explanation of why we must go to such pains to explain one set of
entailment intuitions semantically - namely, the intuition that
(1) is consistent with (3) and so does not entail (4) - while
being so cavalier about relegating other, equally (if not even more)
robust entailment intuitions to a non-semantic theory. The
availability of contextualist theories described above, and in
particular Richard's theory, which at least promises to respect
both sets of entailment relations - that is, respect our
intuitions of entailment failures, as in the Frege-style cases, as
well as our intuitions about entailment successes, as in the relation
between (1) and (22) - makes this second strategy all the more
questionable.



Fiengo and May 1996 argue that ILF accounts lack an adequate
explanation of Kripke's Paderewski puzzle. (See
 Section 8
 below.) In brief, Kripke's puzzle involves pairs of sentences
that, like (1) and (3), are intuitively consistent. Unlike (1) and
(3), however, there do not appear to be different linguistic forms
employed in the complement clauses. Instead, extra-linguistic
contextual changes are employed in such a way that the same linguistic
forms seem to indicate different states of the agent. If there is no
difference in linguistic items, then the ILFs are the same and so the
explanation Larson and Ludlow offer for why (1) and (3) are consistent
cannot be carried over to Kripke's case. This is problematic, as
one would like a uniform explanation of the cases. Ludlow 2000 offers
a response, although it seems to us that he moves drastically away
from the key idea of the initial proposal, in which the LFs are public
language entities.



The assumption of structured propositionalism has two components: The
claim that the objects of the attitudes are propositions and the view
that those items are structured. So far we have discussed various ways
of denying the first. We shall now turn to a discussion of views that
deny the second.



Hintikka 1969, Stalnaker 1984, and Lewis 1986 are the foremost
proponents of unstructured-propositionalism. (See the entry on
 structured propositions
 for further details.) Briefly, the idea is that propositions are sets
of possible worlds. The proposition that Bush is president, for
example, just is the set of all possible worlds in which Bush
instantiates the property *being president*. (Or, to remain
neutral on issues of the metaphysics of transworld identity, all the
worlds in which Bush or a counterpart of Bush instantiates that
property.)



There is no denying that a proposition determines a set of possible
worlds - namely, the worlds at which the proposition is true.
And for a good many semantic purposes - in particular, for
giving the truth-conditions of sentences containing only extensional
operators - treating propositions as sets of worlds suffices.
But there are well known problems with this account when it comes to
propositional attitudes. The most famous problem is the problem of
equivalence. Intuitively, the proposition that arithmetic is
incomplete is distinct from the proposition that 2+2=4. Most
5-year-olds know the latter but can't even entertain the former.
As both propositions are true in exactly the same set of worlds
- namely, all, assuming the necessity of mathematical truths
- unstructured-propositionalism entails that they are the same
proposition. Indeed, unstructured propositionalism entails that there
is exactly one necessary proposition. This is problematic, as it seems
to entail that anyone believes that 2+2=4 just in case he believes
that arithmetic is incomplete.



The view also seems to have all of the problems that face the
neo-Russellianism. Because Superman is Clark Kent, and assuming that
identity is necessary, the set of worlds in which Superman is strong
is exactly the set of worlds in which Clark Kent is strong. But then
(5) and (6) express the same proposition. But, as the Frege case
shows, there is a strong intuition, and a pair of powerful arguments
to back it up, that an agent can believe the one without believing the
other. Proponents of unstructured-propositionalism are well aware of
these problems. Stalnaker 1984, 1987, and 1988 contain extremely
ingenious attempts to solve them.



Whereas proponents of possible world semantics see the contents of the
attitudes being possible worlds, or functions from possible worlds to
truth values, proponents of situation semantics, developed by Barwise
and Perry 1983, see the contents of the attitudes being portions of
possible worlds, situations. Situations are more fine-grained than
possible worlds and so avoid some of the problems discussed above.
But, as Soames shows in his 1985, the account inherits many of the
problems. We shall here discuss just one. Recall that one of the
problems facing Naive Russellianism was that



> 
> (12) Lois believes that Superman is stronger than Clark Kent.
> 



seems to entail



> 
> (13) Lois believes that Superman is stronger than Superman.
> 



which in turn threatens to entail



> 
> (14) Lois believes that Superman is stronger than himself.
> 



Because the situation that Superman is stronger than Clark Kent just
is the situation that Superman is stronger than himself, insofar as
situations are the contents of beliefs, these seem to be the same
belief. The situation semanticist cannot appeal to the difference
between the property of being *taller than Superman* and the
property *being taller than oneself*, claiming that the first
is a two-place relation and the second a monadic property, as the
neo-Russellian can, to distinguish the propositions. This is because a
difference in structure doesn't correspond, for the situation
semanticist, to a difference in proposition. But then the situation
semanticists, as opposed to the Naive Russellian, is committed to the
claim that Lois believes that Superman is stronger than himself. But
surely that is irrational! (For more discussion of the problem, see
Fine 2007, 2014, Pickel 205, Pickel and Rabern 2017, Pinillos 2011,
and Salmon 2012, 2015



We don't claim to have established the assumption of structured
propositionalism. But the problems facing the alternatives do seem
daunting enough to make that assumption a good bet. 


## 8. Two further puzzles: Kripke's puzzles and Richard's puzzle



We have concluded our survey of the main accounts of propositional
attitude reports and their problems. The discussion has focused on
Frege's puzzle. In this section we shall briefly discuss further
puzzles that any account of propositional attitude ascribing sentences
must deal with. The first is a pair of puzzles that Saul Kripke
introduced in his 1979 and the second is a puzzle Richard introduced
in his 1983.



In his 1980 (originally presented as a series of lectures in 1970)
Saul Kripke argued that the reference of a name is not determined by
identifying descriptions a speaker associates with the name but rather
by real world connections between uses of names and objects. In so
arguing, Kripke, among others, paved the way for the now widely
(although not universally) accepted direct reference theory of proper
names. He also ran flat into Frege's puzzle. In his 1980, Kripke
claims to not know what to say about Frege's puzzle and the
related puzzle of cognitive significance, on the one hand, and the
problem of negative existentials and the related problem of empty
names, on the other. In John Locke lectures of 1973, now published as
Kripke 2013, delivered three years after his famous *Naming and
Necessity* lectures, Kripke addressed the second set of problems;
in his 1979, he addressed the first. He did not aim to solve
Frege's puzzle. Instead, his aim was to show that his thesis of
names, which he admitted seems to entail that the substitution of
co-referring proper names within the scope of attitude verbs is
legitimate, is not the true source of the trouble. Kripke argued that
the problems could be replicated without assuming Kripke's
thesis about names, relying instead on translation principles and
context-shifting principles. The problems driving Frege's
puzzle, Kripke aimed to show, did not concern the semantics of proper
names. Frege's puzzle could thus not be used to disprove any
theory of the semantics of proper names. Kripke presented two sets of
cases to convince us of this.



The first case involves a monolingual (French-speaking) Frenchman
- Kripke names him 'Pierre' - who hears about
a city with the name 'Londres'. Pierre forms a good
opinion of the city based on what he hears of it (all in French) and
is disposed to assent to (29) below.



> 
> (29) Londres est jolie.
> 



Pierre is competent and reflective, we can suppose, and so, by an
application of the Disquotation principle, we get (30) below.



> 
> (30) Pierre croit que Londres est jolie.
> 



Kripke then employs a translation principle, according to which a good
translation of a sentence from one language into another preserves the
truth-value of the original. (31) below is a good English translation
of (30).



> 
> (31) Pierre believes that London is pretty.
> 



So, like (30), (31) is also true. Suppose next that Pierre moves to a
foreign land where he learns the native tongue by immersion; he
doesn't learn the translation of any of the words in his new
language into French. He is confined to a rather dreary party of the
city he lives in and comes to believe of it that it is not pretty. The
foreign land, of course, is London and the language he learns is
English. He is soon disposed to assent to (32).



> 
> (32) London is not pretty.
> 



We can suppose that Pierre is as competent in English as any
monolingual English speaker. We are then justified in using
Disquotation to derive (33) below.



> 
> (33) Pierre believes that London is not pretty.
> 



We can go further. Suppose that Pierre positively rejects (34)
below.



> 
> (34) London is pretty.
> 



Then, given Converse Disquotation, we get (35).



> 
> (35) Pierre does not believe that London is pretty.
> 



We can suppose that Pierre is all the while still disposed to assent
to (29); Pierre has not, we can suppose, changed his mind about what
he believed about that foreign city he learned about in France under
the name 'Londres'. So, intuitively, (31) is also still
true.



We have the same set of contradictions we derived earlier in
"Frege's puzzle." Because both (31) and (33) are
true of Pierre at the same time and they appear to involve attribution
to Pierre of belief in a proposition and its negation, it would seem
that Pierre is irrational. Intuitively Pierre is free of irrationality
in his beliefs. (31) and (35) seem to be, themselves, mutually
inconsistent. Yet we derived them using the same basic principles
driving Frege's puzzle. Because we nowhere employed the thesis
of direct reference nor a substitution principle seemingly entailed by
the thesis of direct reference, Kripke concludes that simply denying
the thesis of direct reference is not sufficient for solving the
original Frege puzzle. After all, we get the very same set of problems
without that thesis.



The puzzle of Pierre relies upon a translation principle. But, lest
one think that merely denying that translation principle suffices to
solve Kripke's puzzle, Kripke presents another version of the
puzzle that does not involve translation across languages. This second
puzzle has come to be known as "the Paderewski puzzle."
Suppose that Peter has had interactions with a politician he knows
under the name 'Paderewski' and interactions with a
pianist he knows under the name 'Paderewski'. Peter has no
idea that Paderewski-the-politician is the same person as
Paderewski-the-pianist; he thinks that they are two different people
who happen to have the same name, or at least names that are
pronounced the same. From this assumption, we can see that we could
employ Disquotation, Rationality, and Converse Disquotation to derive
a set of contradictions similar to those involving Lois and Pierre
described above.



Notice that the puzzle here is not that of belief but that of belief
attributions. So, for example, Taschek 1988 is quite right to observe
that, no doubt, Peter possesses two separate modes of presentation of
Paderewski under which he believes of him what he does. But this
observation in itself does not solve Kripke's puzzle, especially
if we think that the public language name 'Paderewski' is
univocal, at least when tied to the relevant Paderewski, and that
Peter is speaking the public language. (Taschek offers solutions to
Kripke's puzzles in his 1997, 1998.) This is not to say that the
puzzle is intractable - indeed, there have been many attempted
solutions to both of Kripke's puzzles. (See, for example, Bach
1997, Bealer 1993, Crimmins 1992a, Crimmins and Perry 1989, Forbes
1990, Lewis 1981, McKay 1981, Recanati 1993, Richard 1990, Salmon
1995a, Sosa 1996.) Rather, it is to say that in order to tract it, one
must give an account of propositional attitude *ascriptions*.
Any adequate account of propositional attitude ascriptions must
account for what is going on in Kripke-style cases. And, as we have
seen above in our discussion of ILFs, Kripke's puzzles can be
used to raise objections to certain proposals of attitude
ascriptions.



In his 1983, Mark Richard introduced us to a puzzle that seems to show
that apparent substitution-failure is not confined to failures inside
the scope of attitude verbs. Part of the interest in the case derives
from the fact that it calls into question the idea that apparent
substitution-failure intuitions can be explained by claiming that
propositional attitude verbs create intensional contexts, being
sensitive to more than just the ordinary referential content of terms
within their scope. This is because Richard describes a case in which
co-referential terms outside the attitude verb are intuitively not
intersubstitutable. (Jennifer Saul presents very different cases
intended to demonstrate the same point. See Braun and Saul 2002 and
Saul 1997, 1999, 2007.) Whereas standard Frege cases exploit identity
confusions of the agent of the belief alone, Richard's cases
exploit identity ignorances of the ascriber. Suppose that Sally is
talking to Bill on the phone when she looks out the window and sees a
steamroller heading towards an occupied phone booth. Sally
doesn't realize that the person in the phone booth is Bill. So,
Sally is disposed to accept (36) but reject (37), despite their having
the same referential content.



> 
> (36) He [pointing out her window at the person in the phone booth] is
> in danger.
> 
> 
> (37) You [addressing Bill on the phone] are in danger.
> 
> 
> 



On the basis of this acceptance patterns, using the principles
generating Frege's puzzle, it would seem that the following are
true as uttered by Sally.



> 
> (38) I believe that he [pointing out her window at the person in the
> phone booth] is in danger.
> 
> 
> (39) I do not believe that you [addressing Bill on the phone] are in
> danger.
> 
> 
> 



So far, nothing too surprising; so far, that is, we just have a
classic Frege-style case. But let's continue the story. Sally
tries to catch the attention of the person in the phone booth to warn
him of the impending danger. She leans out of her window and waves her
arms madly, screaming at the top of her lungs. Bill sees someone
waving and yelling at him, comes to believe that that person believes
of him that he is in danger (although, as he quickly looks around, not
seeing the steamroller, can't imagine why), but doesn't
realize that it is Sally waving her arms. He says to Sally over the
phone, "There's someone waving at me and she believes that
I am in danger." Sally believes what Bill says and so is
disposed to accept (40) below.



> 
> (40) The person waving at you [addressing Bill on the phone] believes
> that you [addressing Bill on the phone] are in danger.
> 



Unbeknownst to Bill and Sally, Sally is the person waving at Bill. The
that-clauses in (39) and (40) are the same. Their difference resides
in the different terms designating Sally, both of which occur outside
the scope of 'believes'. Even if we accept that
co-designating terms are not intersubstitutable inside the scope of
propositional attitude verbs, surely they are outside the scope of an
attitude verb. So (40), together with the fact that Sally is the
person waving at Bill, entails that (41) is true as spoken by
Sally.



> 
> (41) I believe that you [addressing Bill on the phone] are in danger.
> 



(39) and (41) are mutually inconsistent. Furthermore, the truth of
(41) seems out of keeping with the idea that what a person believes
and what she does not believe is revealed by her sincere, competent,
and reflective acceptance patterns, as we have already seen that Sally
does not accept and indeed rejects (37). And as this idea is a driving
force behind Frege's puzzle, those who take Frege's puzzle
to raise problems for Naive Russellianism cannot simply respond to
Richard's puzzle by claiming that (39) is false.



In 1983, Richard took this case to show that our apparent
substitution-failure intuitions should be explained pragmatically and
not semantically. Otherwise, he thought, we have substitution-failures
outside the scope of attitude verbs, which is evidently unacceptable.
While (39) may seem true and (41) may seem false, this is because we
conflate what an utterance of these sentences pragmatically
implicates, suggesting that Sally would accept the complement clause
used to report what she believes. This same explanation, Richard
insists, should be employed in both Frege's and Kripke's
puzzles, leading us to Naive Russellianism.



In their 1989, Crimmins and Perry respond to Richard's challenge
by accepting that there are substitution-failures even outside the
scope of attitude verbs. But, they claim, such failures are limited to
self-attributions like (41), because of what they call "the
pragmatic principle of self-ascription...an utterance of 'I
believe that ...*t*...' provides (or, is about)
the notion that is connected to the speaker's use of
'*t*'." (p. 708). This response assumes that
Richard-style cases require the first-person pronoun. But that
assumption is false. All one needs to construct a Richard-style case
is for the *ascribers* to be ignorant of the identities of the
agents they are ascribing beliefs to. (Recall the cases of conflicting
restrictions described above.) One can then use nothing but
third-person means of designating the alleged believers and get the
same intuitive variation in truth-values. Crimmins and Perry's
hope that such substitution-failures will be confined to cases
involving the first-person pronoun is ill-founded. Hence, if one is
simply going to accept the consequence that there are substitution
failures even outside the scope of the attitude verb, then one will
have to accept that consequence in an unrestricted form. 



Richard no longer believes that his case supports the claim that
apparent substitution-failures are best explained pragmatically. In
his 1990, Richard claims that the appearance of a contradiction turns
on context-shifts. Suppose that Benny says, "I am hungry,"
and Paula says, "I am not hungry." Anyone who attempted to
claim that they can't both be speaking truly would be guilty of
shifting the context in her attempt to derive a contradiction. Paula
does not deny what Benny says, but instead says something about
herself. The context-shift is obvious in this case, as it is obvious
that 'I' is context-sensitive. The context-shift is less
obvious, and hence more pernicious, claims Richard, in the case of
propositional attitude verbs. Richard claims that when we judge (41)
to be false, we are evaluating it relative to a context *c*
such that, were we to evaluate (39) relative to *c* as well, we
would see that it too is false. (In short, we are evaluating it in a
context in which the operative restrictions on correlation functions
are such that 'that you [addressing Bill on the phone] are in
danger' is not mapped on to anything that Sally accepts.) When,
on the other hand, we judge that (39) is true, we are evaluating it
relative to a context *c'* such that, were we to evaluate
(41) relative to *c'* as well, we would see that it too
is true. So, claims Richard, our intuitions turn on shifting the
context. If we focus on any single context, we see that there are no
substitution failures outside the scope of attitude verbs.



Richard offers a similar solution to Kripke's puzzle. In
Kripke-style cases, the attributor is conscious of the
misidentification, and so it is plausible to claim that there is a
context-shift. (Insofar as we grant that something like restrictions
on correlation functions are part of context, that is.) The speaker is
conscious of the fact that her uses of 'London' in
representing Pierre's beliefs are not completely univocal, as
she first uses them to represent his "Londres"-beliefs and
then to represent his "London"-beliefs. But in
Richard's case, the speaker need not be conscious of the
misidentification and hence will not recognize any shift in the
context. She will take her utterances of (39) and (41) to be part of a
single communicative exchange in which no context shifts have been
needed, precisely because she (that is, Sally) takes (39) to concern
one person's beliefs and (41) to concern another person's
beliefs. So, there are reasons to think that our intuitions concerning
the truth and falsity of (39) and (41) do not rely on implicit
context-shifting.



Kripke's puzzles of Pierre and Paderewski and Richard's
puzzle, like Frege's puzzle, provide more data that any adequate
account of attitude ascribing sentences must accommodate. Ultimately,
any such account must fit with a broader theory of human interaction.
People communicate their beliefs, they agree when they share a belief,
and beliefs play a role in motivating and explaining action. Any
account of belief attributions must say how proposition attitude
ascribing sentences contribute to all of this, and the account must
dividing the contribution into its semantic and pragmatic aspects.