Thought-Contents On the Ontology of Belief and the Semantics of Beli

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an a

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Philosophical Studies Series VOLUME 104

Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer Editor Keith Lehrer, University of Arizona, Tucson Associate Editor Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe Board of Consulting Editors Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Radu Bogdan, Tulane Universtiy, New Orleans Marian David, University of Notre Dame Allan Gibbard, University of Michigan Denise Meyerson, Macquarie University François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod, EHESS, Paris Stuart Silvers, Clemson University Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis & Clark College

The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

Thought-Contents On the Ontology of Belief and the Semantics of Belief Attribution

STEVEN E. BOËR Department of Philosophy The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, USA

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-10 1-4020-5084-4 (HB) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5084-8 (HB) ISBN-10 1-4020-5085-2 (e-book) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-5085-5 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2007 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

For Ann and Leah

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction

xi xiii

PART I: PRELIMINARIES 1.

2.

Terms of the Art 1.1. Some types of intentionality 1.2. The substitutional approach and its problems 1.3. Non-Actualism 1.3.1. The being-existence distinction: a proposal 1.3.2. The non-actualist approach to existence-independence and concept-dependence 1.4. Intensionality and extensionality 1.5. Hyper-intensionality 1.6. Opacity and transparency 1.7. De re / de dicto / de se

3 3 9 12 12 15 21 27 32 34

Adequacy Conditions and Failed Theories 2.1. Some general adequacy conditions 2.2. Frege’s theory of thoughts 2.3. Russell’s propositional and multiple-relation theories 2.4. Chisholm’s property-attribution theory

39 39 45 54 65

PART II: ONTOLOGY 3.

Logical Forms and Mental Representations: The Lesson of Russell’s Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment 3.1. Adequacy conditions on the reduction 3.2. The formalities of MRTJ 3.2.1. The base language and underlying logic 3.2.2. Some primitive vocabulary and axioms of MRTJ 3.2.3. Truth in MRTJ

vii

81 82 83 83 84 89

viii

Contents

3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.6. 3.7. 4.

5.

The theory  The bridge principles and reduction of MRTJ to + Vindication and the adequacy conditions Implications of the reduction of MRTJ for our wider project The shape of things to come

Thought-Contents, Senses, and the Belief Relation: The Proto-Theory 4.1. Overview