Background for a Discussion of Kripke's "A Puzzle About Belief"

London Ed wants to discuss the Paderewski example in Saul Kripke's  "A Puzzle About Belief."  But before doing so we should see if we agree on some preliminary points.  Knowing Ed, he will probably find a way to disagree with a good chunk what I am about to say.  So I expect we will get bogged down in preliminaries and never proceed to Paderewski.  We shall see.  Kripke references are to Philosophical Troubles, Oxford 2011.

Belief de re and belief de dicto

Kripke makes it clear that he is concerned only with belief de dicto in the paper in question (128).  So we need to understand the restriction.  The following I take to be constructions expressive of belief de re.

Cicero is believed by Tom to be a Roman
Cicero is believed to be a Roman by Tom
Cicero is such that Tom believes him to be a Roman
Tom believes, of Cicero, that he is a Roman

De re means: of or pertaining to the res, the thing, where 'of' is an objective genitive.  De dicto means: of or pertaining to the dictum, that which is said (dico, dicere, dixi, dictum), where the 'of' is again an objective genitive.  A dictum is the content of an assertive utterance.  It is a proposition, what Frege called a thought (ein Gedanke), not a thinking, but the accusative of a thinking.  I am not assuming a Fregean as opposed to a Russellian theory of propositions.  But we do need to speak of propositions.  And Kripke does.  For the time being we can say that propositions are the objects/accusatives/contents of such propositional attitudes as belief. Of course they have other roles to play as well.

What makes the above sentences de re is that they ascribe a property to Cicero as he is in himself, and not as he appears before the mind of Tom.  Or at least that is the way I would put it.  Because of this the following argument is valid:

Cicero is believed by Tom to be a Roman
Cicero = Tully
Ergo
Tully is believed by Tom to be a Roman.

The presiding principle is the Indiscernibility of Identicals: if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa.  So if Cicero = Tully, and the former is believed by Tom to be a Roman, then Tully is also believed by Tom to be a Roman.  This is so even if Tom has never heard of Tully, or has heard of him but has no opinion as to his identity or non-identity with Cicero.  But the following argument, whose initial premise is expressive of belief de dicto, is invalid:

Tom believes that: Cicero is a Roman.
Cicero = Tully
Ergo
Tom believes that: Tully is a Roman.

The conclusion does not follow in the de dicto case because (i) Tom may never have heard of Tully and neither believes nor disbelieves anything about him, (ii) or  Tom has heard of Tully but has no opinion about his identity or non-identity with Cicero. What this example suggests is that codesignative singular terms are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva veritate.  The Latin phrase means: in a truth-preserving manner.  De dicto belief contexts are thus contexts  in which intersubstitutability of coreferential names appears to fail.  Thus if we substitute 'Tully' for 'Cicero' in the initial premise, we turn a truth into a falsehood despite the fact that the two names refer to the same man.

What this suggests, in turn, is that there is more to the semantics of a proper name than its reference.  It suggests that names have both sense and reference.  It suggests that what Tom has before his mind, the proposition toward which he takes up the propositional attitude of belief, does not have as subject-constituent Cicero himself, warts and all,  but a mode of presentation (Frege: Darstellungsweise) of the man himself, a sense (Sinn) that determines the reference to the man himself.

Before proceeding, we  note the difference between the de re

There is someone Tom believes to be a faithful husband

and the de dicto

Tom believes that: there are faithful husbands.

The first entails the second, but the second does not entail the first.  For if one believes that there are faithful husbands, one needn't  believe, of any particular man, that he is a faithful husband.  What one believes is that some man or other is a faithful husband.  Tom: "I'm sure there are faithful husbands; I just can't name one."

A problem for a Millian theory of proper names

Kripke tells us that on a "strict Millian view . . . the linguistic function of a proper name is completely exhausted by the fact that it names its bearer . . . ." (127)  Whether or not this is the view of the historical J. S. Mill is of no present concern.  The Millian view contrasts with the Fregean view according to which names have reference-determining senses.   The problem posed for Millian names by de dicto belief may be set forth as an aporetic tetrad:

a. There is no semantic difference between codesignative Millian proper names.
b. If (a), then 'a is F' and 'b is F' express the same proposition where 'a' and 'b' are both Millian and codesignative.
c. A person who believes a proposition cannot doubt or disbelieve that same proposition.
d. There are countless cases in which a person believes a proposition of the form a is F while doubting or disbelieving a proposition of the form b is F even when a = b.

This foursome is clearly inconsistent.  But each of the limbs, with the exception of the first, is extremely plausible if not undeniable. So the natural solution is to jettison (a) and with it Millian semantics for proper names. But this is what the Millian Kripke is loath to do.  He has already convinced himself that ordinary proper names are rigid designators whose designation does not depend on reference-determining senses.

Related articles

Language and Reality

A Searle-y Objection to the Causal Theory of Names

In What Sense Does an Indefinite Noun Phrase Refer?

Linguistic Change and Linguistic Conservatism

Comments

[Ed from London]

>>Knowing Ed, he will probably find a way to disagree with a good chunk what I am about to say.
I totally disagree with this.

[Ed from London]

However aside from that, I broadly agree with your characterisation of the puzzle.

But note the puzzle above is the Frege puzzle, not the Kripke puzzle, aka Paderewski puzzle.

[Bill Vallicella]

You're right. I am not yet discussing the Paderewski puzzle. But part of its motivation is the Frege puzzle. See section II of Kripke's paper right near the beginning.

[London Ed]

>>See section II of Kripke's paper right near the beginning.

That's section I isn’t it? The section entitled ‘I. Preliminaries: Substitutivity’, and which begins ‘In other writings, I developed a view of proper names closer in many ways to the old Millian paradigm …’?

It would be worth listing some of the arguments Kripke gives for the Millian view.

1. While it may be plausible to suppose that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ had different senses before they sorted the astronomy out, what corresponding conventional senses, even taking ‘senses’ to be ‘modes of fixing the reference rigidly’ can plausibly be supposed to exist for ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ (or ‘Holland’ and ‘the Netherlands’)? Aren't these just two names (in English) for the same man? Is there any special conventional, community-wide ‘connotation’ in the one lacking in the other? K says he is unaware of any. There is an ‘obvious intuitive unpalatability’ that we use proper names like ‘Cicero’, ‘Venice’, ‘Venus’ with differing senses, and that we thus do not ‘strictly speaking’ use the same language.

2. There is a considerable literature that even synonyms like ‘doctor’ and ‘physician’ are not interchangeable in belief contexts.

3. If Frege-Russell are right, it is not easy to state the very argument from belief contexts that appears to support them. E.g. if I say ‘Many are unaware that Cicero is Tully’, I would use ‘that Cicero is Tully’ to denote the proposition that I understand by these words. What proposition is that? What is the proposition that these people are unaware of?

4. People who are able define ‘Cicero’ as ‘the denouncer of Cataline’ are pretty rare. Philosophers use the example because they are classically educated, unlike ‘the common man’. Common men may just think of Cicero as ‘some famous Roman orator’, i.e. the sense they attach to the name may just be an indefinite description. And clearly they can reasonably ask ‘were Cicero and Tully one Roman orator, or two different ones’. Thus the underlying assumption of the Frege-Russell argument, that substitution failure arises from a difference in a definite descriptions attached to names, is false. ‘So the apparent failure of codesignative names to be everywhere interchangeable in belief contexts, is not to be explained by differences in the ‘senses’ of these names’.

I hope I have summarised these correctly.

[Bill Vallicella]

No, I mean section II, first para, where SK speaks of the "initial argument against Mill." My tetrad was supposed to capture it.

Isn't Kripke's Paderewski puzzle just Quine's Ortcutt puzzle recycled? No doubt you have studied Quine's seminal 1956 J of Phil paper, "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes."

Back to Ortcutt! (There was a neo-Kantian who ended every chapter with "Zurueck zu Kant!"

I will now begin a separate post on Ortcutt and Paderewski.

Another relevant discussion is Appendix C of Chisholm's *Person and Object.*

[London Ed]

Ah right.

If reference is all there is to naming, what semantic difference can there be between ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’? And if there is no semantic difference, do not ‘Cicero was bald’ and ‘Tully was bald’ express exactly the same proposition? How, then, can anyone believe that Cicero was bold, yet doubt or disbelieve that Tully was?

But this must be read in the context of the arguments he gives in Section I. He concedes that anyone who grasps the meaning of ‘Cicero’ as ‘a Roman orator’, i.e. as indefinite description, and the same for Tully, can believe that Cicero was bold, yet doubt or disbelieve that Tully was. But this is not reference. Reading ‘Cicero’ as an indefinite description, which Kripke concedes is possible, is not reading the names as proper names. Thus it is perfectly possible that reference is all there is to proper names, read as proper names, but that doesn’t mean we can’t read them as indefinite descriptions.

This is why, in setting up the problem later on, he insists that the proper name is read in the standard or usual way, i.e. as a proper name.

>> Isn't Kripke's Paderewski puzzle just Quine's Ortcutt puzzle recycled?
It’s in front of me as we speak. Or you could say it’s the masked man puzzle of the ancient Greeks, which Quine recycled. I have just looked at it again. Yes, the Paderewski puzzle is similar to the Ortcutt puzzle. But Quine is writing in 1956, when a Frege-Russell view of proper names was in vogue, whereas Kripke introduced and popularised the doctrine of direct reference. Quine solves the problem by two different kinds of belief, such that

(B1) It is impossible that S sincerely denies ‘p’ and S believes-1 that p
(B2) It is possible that S sincerely denies ‘p’ and S believes-2 that p

Kripke, as I understand him, only wants to accept belief-2, which is consistent with direct referentialism. His reasoning is based on the ‘standard meaning’ doctrine of proper names, although he concedes that belief-2 presents puzzles.

>>"Zurueck zu Kant!"
If you hold down the Alt key then the number 129, you get the umlaut. Zurück zu Kant.

[London Ed]

I was also looking at ‘Quantifying In’, by David Kaplan, Synthese 19, 1968. For those who do not have the patience to wade through Kaplan’s meandering prose, try Marc Cohen’s accessible paper about Kaplan’s paper here. As Cohen explains, Kaplan has two belief operators B and Bel, which I think correspond to Quine’s belief-1 and belief-2 respectively. Also known as ‘notional’ and ‘relational’ belief respectively.

We can quantify into relational belief sentences, i.e. ‘Hegel Bel (‘x is greater than five’, nine)’ implies Ey Hegel Bel (‘x is greater than five’, y), but we can’t quantify into notional belief sentences. I.e. Ralph B ‘the man in the brown hat is a spy’ does not imply Ralph Bel (‘x is a spy’, the man in the brown hat).

Nor from ‘Ralph B “the shortest spy is a spy”’ can we infer Ralph Bel (“x is a spy,” the shortest spy). As Kaplan wittily says, the first sentence would not interest the FBI.

[Bill Vallicella]

>>"Zurueck zu Kant!"
If you hold down the Alt key then the number 129, you get the umlaut. Zurück zu Kant.

Do you have three hands like the Venusian in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "Will the real Martian Please Stand Up?"

[London Ed]

I am looking forward to your post on Ortcutt and Paderewski. So far so good. Broad agreement.

[Bill Vallicella]

I am working on it now. Fascinating topic. And think there is a significant tie-in with the 'same God?' business.

[London Ed]

>>And think there is a significant tie-in with the 'same God?' business.

Yes. How can we get from B sentences which mention the name 'God', to Bel sentences, which invoke 'ofness', and which use the name ‘God’. When the Muslim and the Christian each assents to 'God is great', do they believe of the same being that this being is great?

Can we get from B(‘God is great’) to Bel(‘x is great’, God)? Was that what you were thinking?

And have you revisited Kaplan's idea of a 'vivid name'? Cohen discusses it in the paper linked to above.

[London Ed]

As follows. According to Kaplan, a name alpha represents x to a person if and only if (i) alpha denotes x, (ii) alpha is a name of x for that person, and (iii) alpha is (sufficiently) vivid.

Thus we could say the name ‘God’ represents God to a person if and only if (i) ‘God’ denotes God, (ii) ‘God’ is a name of God for that person, and (iii) the name ‘God’ is (sufficiently) vivid.

Likewise ‘Allah’ represents God to a person if and only if (i) ‘Allah’ denotes God, (ii) ‘Allah’ is a name of God for that person, and (iii) the name ‘Allah’ is (sufficiently) vivid.