Saul Kripke on Belief Ascription

Mircea Dumitru

Universitatea din București

pp. 3-24

in: Inaugural issue, East Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1), 2021.

Abstract

The paper critically examines the issue of whether failure of attributing propositional attitudes, such as belief ascriptions, is intrinsically failure to substitute codesignative terms (names) within opaque contexts. One open question is whether Fregean “senses” still have any role to play within semantics. This question is more acute in the aftermath of Kripke’s (Kripke 1980), because one of the most remarkable achievements of the arguments Kripke deploys is the demolition of the Frege-Russell tradition in regard to the semantics of names. The descriptive theory of names, the view that names are disguised definite descriptions, and, in general, the Fregean mechanism of referring through senses that are expressed by definite descriptions associated with names have become obsolete. And there has been a growing consensus among logicians and philosophers of language that as long as we stick to direct discourse, to transparent contexts, and to the modal case, the Millian view on proper names that Kripke has advocated so forcefully cannot be plausibly denied. Still, having in view the peculiar consequences that Kripke’s Millian view on names may have for opaque contexts, and particularly for the interpretation of the substitutivity of codesignative singular terms (especially names) within propositional attitude ascriptions, one may wonder, and consequently, one can legitimately ask, whether Fregean “senses” don’t have still something to offer. Thus, examining and assessing Kripke’s (Kripke 1994) one may legitimately wonder whether there is still a case for Fregean senses within semantics of belief ascriptions. The paper examines aspects of the dialectics which is going on in this debate and points at some open issues which are worth pursuing in the spirit of Kripke’s (Kripke 1994).

Cited authors

Frege Gottlob

Russell Bertrand

Mill John Stuart

Kripke Saul