The paper analyzes the meaning of color terms within the framework of Kaplan's character theory (which, when generalized to a treatment of hidden indexicality or dependence on the context world, can perfectly accommodate Kripke's notions of apriority and of (metaphysical) necessity). It explains this framework and why it might be fruitfully applied to color terms. Then it defends six theses: that (1) the predicate "is red" and (2) even the relation "appears red to" are hidden indexicals (i.e., have, as used (...) in English, different extensions in different context worlds), that (3) the phenomenal, the comparative, and the epistemic reading of "appears red to" are not three different readings, but reflect the context world dependence of this term, that (4) the statement "x is red iff x would appear red to most English-speaking people under normal conditions" is a priori in English, but analytic only in one reading and not in another, and that these observations account well for the epistemology of color terms and allow us to be metaphysically conservative by claiming that our context world is presumably such that (5) the statement "x appears red to y iff x (appropriately) causes y to be in a certain (disjunctive) neural state N" is necessarily true and (6) the statement "x is red iff the reflectance spectrum of the surface of x is of some (disjunctive) kind R" is necessarily true as well. (shrink)

Je soutiens que Kripke n'a pas réussi à montrer que certains principes plausibles gouvernant l'attribution de croyances, tels que les principes de décitation et de traduction, pouvaient nous conduire à attribuer des croyances de dicto contradictoires à un sujet réfléchi et linguistiquement compétent sans présupposer une théorie descriptive des noms propres ou des termes désignant des espèces naturelles. Les cas décrits par Kripke se réduisent à des variantes du problème de Quine concernant les croyances de re ou à des variantes (...) du puzzle de Mates concernant l'intersubstiruabilité des synonymes dans les contextes de croyance.I claim that Kripke failed to show that certain plausible principles governing belief ascription, such as the disquotation and translation principles, could lead one to ascribe contradictory de dicto beliefs to a reflexive and linguistically competent agent without presupposing a descriptive theory of names or natural kind terms. Kripke's examples are nothing but variants either of Quine's problem about de re beliefs, or of Mates' puzzle concerning the interchangeability of synonyms in belief contexts. (shrink)

Frege's puzzle about identity sentences has long challenged many philosophers to find a solution to it but also led other philosophers to object that the evidential datum it is grounded on is false. The present work is an elaboration of this second kind of reaction: it explains why Frege's puzzle seems to resist the traditional objection, giving voice to different and more elaborated presentations of the evidential datum, faithful to the spirit but not to the letter of Frege's puzzle. The (...) final outcome is negative, no satisfactory formulation of the evidential datum is found and Frege's puzzle is challenged until a better formulation of it is found. (shrink)