Abstract
In this paper, I investigate the prospects for using the distinction between rejection and denial to resolve Saul Kripke’s puzzle about belief. One puzzle Kripke presents in “A Puzzle About Belief” poses what would have seemed a fairly straightforward question about the beliefs of the bilingual Pierre, who is disposed to sincerely and reflectively assent to the French sentence “Londres est jolie”, but not to the English sentence “London is pretty”, both of which he understands perfectly well. The question to be answered is whether Pierre believes that London is pretty, and Kripke argues, of each answer, that it is unacceptable. On my proposal, either answer to the question is to be rejected, but neither answer is to be denied, using the resource of partially-defined predicates. After demonstrating how this serves as a solution to the puzzle, I illustrate some philosophical motivations—independent of Kripke’s puzzle—for adopting a view on which belief is a partially defined predicate. I conclude that there are decent prospects for the proposed response to Kripke’s puzzle.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It should also be noted that, apparently, Kripke’s example invokes somewhat odd if not outright improper French; I have been informed by French speakers that “belle” is more appropriate than “jolie” when talking about cities. Fortunately, nothing in the discussion turns on the specific terms chosen, so I will simply stick to the established example.
Though Kripke himself eschews talk of propositions, I find it helpful to frame things in terms of propositions, and one primary motivation for doing so will become apparent from my discussion of the Liar’s paradox.
For examples of views that would simply provide “yes” answers, see Lewis (1981), Salmon (1989), Soames (2002), or McGlone (2007). It is common of such views to reject the principle that lack of assent to a sentence indicates absence of belief, though the Lewisian solution is notable for going beyond this by offering a more drastic revision of the semantics of belief ascriptions implicit in Kripke’s discussion.
By qualifying the context-sensitivity involved in the third option as semantic, I mean to exclude, for example, approaches like the pragmatic enrichment story advocated in Soames (2002). On that view, there is a sensible question to be asked about the truth of the context-invariant semantic content of the belief ascription, and given that the belief-ascription’s semantic value is a true proposition, it seems appropriate to group that view (and views like it) with the first way of responding. For contextualist answers of the sort I have in mind, see Richard (1990), Schiffer (1987), Stalnaker (1999), Crimmins (1992), and Crimmins and Perry (1989).
While I do not wish to argue that this solution is something Kripke had in mind, it is worth noting that a thought along these lines is suggested by the well known passage in the preface of Kripke (1980), where Kripke claims to be “unsure that the apparatus of ‘propositions’ does not break down” in epistemic contexts. I think that the account I will propose in this paper would be one way of explaining such a break-down. It is worth noting that Fine (2009) similarly claims to offer some vindication of this remark of Kripke’s. As his view involves positing multiple readings of belief attributions, some of which are contextually determined in part by the other sentences uttered in the discourse as well as the rejection of compositionality, it will be apparent that neither the view I articulate, nor the manner in which it would vindicate Kripke’s comments is particularly similar to the view espoused by Fine.
As noted above, I differ here from Kripke by freely relying on the notion of a proposition in presenting this puzzle. The prevalence of propositions in debates about the nature of belief makes it important to demonstrate that the approach being advocated can be framed in terms of propositions.
This discussion of the Liar is adapted from Soames (1999).
As we will see shortly, rejecting a proposition may be different from denying the proposition. See also, for example, Field (2008).
See Strawson (1950).
Here, I am following Soames in taking propositions to be both (a) the primary bearers of truth and falsity, and (b) the objects of the attitudes. Unless otherwise noted, these arguments rely on no other substantive assumptions about the nature of propositions.
To make it clear why a Strawsonian treatment would avoid the need to reject propositional bivalence, we can observe that the explanation for the sentence’s status depends on there being no proposition from which to inherit a truth-value. Failures of Strawsonian presupposition allow us to assess the sentences (or utterances) as truth-valueless without having to reject the view that every proposition is true or false.
I am ignoring a variety of possible complications arising from views which also regard definite descriptions (or sentences containing them) as semantically context-sensitive for ease of exposition.
To a rough approximation, this is simply because, falsity of the presupposition prevents the proposition from possessing a referent. Since, the referent of a proposition, on Frege’s view, is its truth value, failure to possess a referent is equivalent to failure to possess a truth value. For more detailed exposition of this claim, see Chap. 6 of Soames (1999), and Atlas (2004).
Note that an adaptation of this Fregean approach would be one straightforward way of implementing the strategy of regarding the belief-ascriptions for Pierre as lacking truth values.
This is neither to criticize the use of Strawsonian presupposition in treating sentences like “This is a fine red one” nor the use of logical presupposition in treating sentences like “The present king of France is bald”, only the thought that these resources can be employed to resolve the Liar paradox.
There is one hitch in the analogy, which is important to observe. When it comes to division by zero, we can affirm: “For any numerical value z, six divided by zero is not z”, in part because Not Six isn’t a numerical value, and thus, isn’t one of the values z can take. If it were, then by affirming that sentence, we would be committed to the claim that six divided by zero is not not six (or, equivalently, that six divided by zero is six). So, when it comes to the case of truth-values, we can’t affirm: “For any truth-value v, sentence (1) is not v”, precisely because, Not True is among the values v can take.
Soames notes that he is attempting to provide a philosophical semantic theory based on insights about the views in Kripke (1975) suggested to Soames by Nathan Salmon.
According to a footnote in Soames (1999), this example is adapted from a case suggested to him by Nathan Salmon in a seminar.
For considerations of space, I will not go into the motivation for Soames’s account here. Additionally, there are important limitations of this approach in terms of its ability to fully resolve the Liar paradox, but these, too, are not relevant to our present interests. For more on the motivation behind Soames’s account, and its limitations, see Chaps. 5 and 6 of Soames (1999).
Given my interest in showing the parallel to the Liar paradox in this paper, it makes sense to structure the puzzle in a fashion that is not particularly illuminating with respect to the variety of other ways in which one might try to resist or deny assumptions leading to the contradiction. Consequently, some philosophers with radically different takes on the puzzle would all be classed together as rejecting what I call “Schema B”. For a formulation of the puzzle that separates out various component principles and allows for a far more interesting classification of alternative responses than my formulation, see Bach (1997).
This is not to say that the puzzle is only puzzling contingent on the truth of these premises: obviously P1–P4 are in fact false unless preceded by an “According to Kripke’s case” operator, but we are puzzled nonetheless.
For simplicity, I avoid explicitly qualifying assignments as relative to world-time pairs, but it should be clear that something like this would be needed to capture the modal and temporal profile of the sentences/propositions.
Contrast this with what we might consider a more orthodox Millian approach to the puzzle, as presented in Salmon (1989), on which some instances of Schema B (such as B2) are simply false.
There is not a straightforward, universally accepted account of the relationship between a given disposition and corresponding counterfactuals. Among those working on dispositions, a variety of accounts are still considered live options, and I do not mean to presume the truth of any one of those accounts in this work. Rather, I hope to confine my discussion, for the most part, to cases in which the verdicts about the counterfactuals would be largely convergent, and avoid engaging with the details of those debates.
For some examples of more extensively/thoroughly worked out dispositional accounts of belief, see Armstrong (1973), and Schwitzgebel (2002). Though my discussion is greatly simplified relative to any serious attempt to give a dispositional account of belief, this is principally due to my focus and for ease of exposition.
For present purposes, verbal presentation requires some sort of linguistic comprehension. If someone utters a Russian sentence to someone who does not speak Russian, no proposition has been verbally presented, as I will use the term.
Note that this case is given in terms of being disposed not to accept something, which is crucially different from simply not being disposed to accept it. It might be that the disposition to not accept entails not having a disposition to accept, but the reverse is not the case.
This is meant to be a somewhat formal point about dispositions: it is not possible for someone to be disposed to do X in C and disposed not to do X in C at the same time. This is importantly different from the more substantive claim that it is not possible for someone to be disposed to accept P in C and disposed to accept ~P in C. One might take a committed dialetheist to have the latter pair of dispositions, without attributing to them the former.
This reasoning should be acceptable regardless of whether one wishes to treat assent to a sentence (withholding assent) as constitutive of acceptance (non-acceptance), or merely as evidentially related to acceptance (non-acceptance).
For more thorough discussions of how dispositions can remain present even when the simple counterfactuals fail to be true, see Lewis (2003), Manley and Wasserman (2008), or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on dispositions—Fara (2009). While I do not have the space to engage with the details here, it is worth noting that the phenomena of “masks” and “finks” are commonly accepted among theorists working on dispositions. For a notable exception see Gunderson (2002).
This should not be taken to require that one understands every “ordinary” sentence that expresses the proposition. A monolingual English speaker who hears “Londres est jolie” is not confronted with the proposition that London is pretty. A lack of understanding of some sentence expressing the proposition prevents that sentence from being a way of confronting the individual with that proposition, in the sense relevant to the proposed account of belief.
It is crucial to note here that such a contextualist maneuver is intended in a fashion completely compatible with neither answer being appropriate in our context (that is, the context in which we are theorists with a full understanding of Pierre’s situation). In other words, one could maintain that there is a sensible question asked in our context (where theoretical concerns are dominant), and that we cannot appropriately give either answer, but in other contexts, for instance, where more practical concerns are salient, it may be that one or the other answer is licensed.
This tweak could also be utilized to generate a contextualist semantics, but it is beyond my aims to discuss this.
References
Armstrong, D. (1973). Belief, truth, and knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Atlas, J. (2004). Presupposition. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Bach, K. (1997). Do belief reports report beliefs? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 78(3), 215–241.
Bealer, G. (1993). A solution to Frege’s puzzle. Philosophical Perspectives, 7, 17–60.
Crimmins, M. (1992). Talk about beliefs. Boston: MIT Press.
Crimmins, M., & Perry, J. (1989). The prince and the phone booth. The Journal of Philosophy, 86(12), 685–711.
Fara, M. (2009). Dispositions. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer Edition), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/dispositions/.
Field, H. (2008). Saving truth from paradox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fine, K. (2009). Semantic relationism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Forbes, G. (1990). Indispensability of sinn. The Philosophical Review, 99(4), 535–563.
Frege, G. (1960). On sense and reference (orig. 1892) (Reprinted in Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing).
Gunderson, L. (2002). In defense of the conditional account of dispositions. Synthese, 130(3), 389–411.
Hyde, D. (1997). From heaps and gaps to heaps of gluts. Mind, 6(424), 641–660.
King, J. (2001). Complex demonstratives. Boston: MIT Press.
Kripke, S. (1975). Outline of a theory of truth. The Journal of Philosophy, 72(19), 690–716.
Kripke, S. (1979). A puzzle about belief. In A. Margalit (Ed.), Meaning and use. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, D. (1981). What puzzling Pierre does not believe. The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 59(3), 283–289.
Lewis, D. (2003). Finkish dispositions. The Philosophical Quarterly, 47(187), 143–158.
Manley, D., & Wasserman, R. (2008). On linking dispositions and conditionals. Mind, 117(465), 59–84.
McGlone, M. (2007). Assertion, belief, and semantic content. Dissertation.
Priest, G. (1987). In contradiction: A study of the transconsistent. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
Priest, G., & Berto, F. (2010). Dialetheism. In Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer Edition), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/dialetheism/.
Richard, M. (1990). Propositional attitudes: An essay on thoughts and how we ascribe them. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Salmon, N. (1989). Illogical belief. Philosophical Perspectives, 3, 243–285.
Salmon, N. (2002). Demonstrating and necessity. The Philosophical Review, 111(4), 497–537.
Schiffer, S. (1987). Belief ascription. The Journal of Philosophy, 89(10), 499–521.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2002). A phenomenal, dispositional account of belief. Nous, 36(2), 249–275.
Soames, S. (1999). Understanding truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. (2002). Beyond rigidity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. (2004). Naming and asserting. In Z. Szabo (Ed.), Semantics and pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. (2009). The possibility of partial definition. In R. Dietz & S. Moruzzi (Eds.), Cuts and clouds: Essays on the nature of vagueness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1999). Belief attribution and context. In R. Stalnaker (Ed.), Context and content. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, P. (1950). On Referring. Mind, 59(235), 320–344.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to David Braun, Scott Soames, and Mark Schroeder for immensely helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Nathan Salmon for some enlightening discussions of Kripke’s puzzle, and to several anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Powell, L. How to refrain from answering Kripke’s puzzle. Philos Stud 161, 287–308 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9739-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9739-9