10 - A Note on Kripke’s Puzzle about Belief

Summary

Abstract

Millianism is the doctrine that the semantic content of a proper name is just the name’s designatum. Without endorsing Millianism Kripke uses his well-known puzzle about belief as a defense of Millianism against the standard objection from apparent failure of substitution. On the other hand, he is not resolutely neutral. Millianism has it that Pierre has the contradictory beliefs that London is pretty and that London is not pretty – that Pierre both believes and disbelieves that London is pretty. I argue here for hard results in connection with Saul Kripke’s puzzle and for resulting constraints on a correct solution. Kripke flatly rejects as incorrect the most straightforwardly Millian answer to the puzzle. Instead he favors a view according to which not all instances of his disquotational principle schema and its converse (which taken together are equivalent to his strengthened disquotational schema) are true although none are false. I argue in sharp contrast that the disquotational schema is virtually analytic. More accurately, every instance of the disquotational schema (appropriately restricted) is true by virtue of pure semantics. Moreover, there is an object-theoretic general principle that underlies the disquotational schema, is itself analytic, and entails each of the instances of the disquotational schema. By contrast, the converse of the disquotational principle leads to a genuine contradiction and is thereby straightforwardly falsified by Kripke’s own example.