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- Bryan Frances (1998). Defending Millian Theories. Mind 107 (428):703-728.In this article I offer a three-pronged defense of Millian theories, all of which share the rough idea that all there is to a proper name is its referent, so it has no additional sense. I first give what I believe to be the first correct analysis of Kripke’s puzzle and its anti-Fregean lessons. The main lesson is that the Fregean’s arguments against Millianism and for the existence of semantically relevant senses (that is, individuative elements of propositions or belief contents that are sensitive to our varying personal conceptions of the referents of those elements) are viciously circular. Thus, the Fregean must give new arguments for her central claims. Second, I offer an original, positive argument for the Millian idea that the thoughts that Cicero was bald and that Tully was bald are identical. Incredibly, the argument appeals to nothing but highly intuitive, pre-theoretical principles regarding folk psychological usage—traditionally the source of Fregean intuitions. Third, I examine one of the most important recent papers on Kripke’s puzzle, that by David Sosa (1996). Sosa claims to have found a way to turn the tables on Kripke’s puzzle by using it to argue against Millian theories. I argue that Sosa’s argument on behalf of the Fregean is question-begging. I conclude that Millian theories can be seriously defended without any use of theoretical constructs such as guises or Russellian propositions, and Fregeans need to start over arguing for their theory’s central claims.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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In his famous 1979 article 'A Puzzle About Belief' Saul Kripke presents two puzzles regarding belief attribution, and he uses them to cast doubt on classical substitution arguments against the Millian view that a proper name has a 'denotation' (or reference) but no 'connotation' (or sense). In this article, I present Kripke's puzzles in what I take to be their most revealing form, discuss their relevance to the abovementioned arguments, briefly survey the ways in which philosophers have responded to these puzzles, and call attention to some issues related to the puzzles that have yet to receive the consideration they deserve.
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| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Kripke, in "Naming and Necessity", defended answers to two kinds of questions about names and reference: a Millian semantics that answers a question of descriptive semantics and a causal account of reference that answers a metasemantic question--a question about what makes a descriptive semantic theory correct. It is argued that the main philosophical work in Kripke's defense of his account of names and reference is done by distinguishing the questions of clarifying the alternative possible answers to them in a way that provides a rebuttal to philosophical arguments that a Millian semantics is impossible.
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| | Other links: sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080 | Scholar | More options ... Kripke’s puzzle has puts pressure on the intuitive idea that one can believe that Superman can fly without believing that Clark Kent can fly. If this idea is wrong then many theories of belief and belief ascription are built from faulty data. I argue that part of the proper analysis of Kripke’s puzzle refutes the closure principles that show up in many important arguments in epistemology, e.g., if S is rational and knows that P and that P entails Q, then if she considers these two beliefs and Q, then she is in a position to know that..
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| | Other links: interscience.wiley.com blackwell-synergy.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... There is a fairly general consensus that names are Millian (or Russellian) genuine terms, that is, are singular terms whose sole semantic function is to introduce a referent into the propositions expressed by sentences containing the term. This answers the question as to what sort of proposition is expressed by use of sentences containing names. But there is a second serious semantic problem about proper names, that of how the referents of proper names are determined. This is the question that I will discuss in this paper. Various views consistent with Millianism have been proposed as to how the semantic referents of proper names are determined. These views can be classified into (1) description theories and (2) causal theories, but they can also be classified into (3) social practice theories, on which a name’s referent is determined by a social practice involving the referent, and (4) individualistic theories, on which the referent of the use of a name is determined by the speaker’s state of mind. Here I argue against social practice theories of the sorts proposed by Kripke and Evans and in favor of an individualistic approach to name reference. I argue that social practice is irrelevant to determining name reference and that, as a consequence, names have no meanings in natural languages. In the second part of the paper I motivate and propose a new form of individualistic theory which incorporates features of both description theories and Evans’s social practice theory.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In an English article (‘On Expressions’) Professor Shen Youding writes, ‘the meaning of a name is not the object which is mentioned by means of it’ (Shen 1992: 11). This remark touches on a big issue that has divided contemporary philosophers of language. On the one side is the Millian (after J.S. Mill), who maintains that the semantic value of a name is the object which it designates, denotes, or refers to (as I use them here, these three terms are interchangeable). [1] On the other side is the Fregean (after Gottlob Frege), who thinks that a name has a sense in addition to a reference. [2] Though Professor Sheng’s remark is too brief for us to claim that he would have been prepared to endorse the Fregean idea, it is clear that he was not a Millian.
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| | Scholar | More options ... In 'A Puzzle about Belief' Saul Kripke appeals to a principle of disquotation that allows us to infer a person's beliefs from the sentences to which she assents (in certain conditions). Kripke relies on this principle in constructing some famous puzzle cases, which he uses to defend the Millian view that the sole semantic function of a proper name is to refer to its bearer. The examples are meant to undermine the anti-Millian objection, grounded in traditional Frege-cases, that truth-value is not always maintained when co-referential names are intersubstituted in belief reports. I argue here that our disquotational practice is sensitive to certain shifts in conversational context, and it is only if we overlook these shifts - if we 'misdisquote' - that we can draw the conclusions Kripke wants to draw from his examples. In the wake of this conclusion, I provide a 'contextualist' treatment of Kripke's puzzle cases. I show how this treatment is motivated by certain norms of rationality, and I defend these norms against an intriguing 'anti-Cartesian' theory of mind. Throughout the paper, I develop the larger implications that my treatment of Kripke's argument has for the semantic theory of names and belief reports, and, more generally, for our picture of the relation between linguistic behaviour and our states of mind.
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| | Other links: mind.oxfordjournals.org jstor.org mind.oupjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... These days the two most popular approaches to belief ascription are Millianism and Contextualism. The former approach is inconsistent with the existence of ordinary Frege cases, such as Lois believing that Superman flies while failing to believe that Clark Kent flies. The Millian holds that the only truth-conditionally relevant aspect of a proper name is its referent or extension. Contextualism, as I will define it for the purposes of this essay, includes all theories according to which ascriptions of the form ‘S believes that a is F’ and ‘S believes that b is F’, where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are coreferential proper names, may, depending on the context, differ in truth-value even though in those very contexts each ascription relates the same believer to the very same proposition. What the two theories have in common is the claim that names are Millian. What separates the two theories is what they say about belief contexts. In this essay I prove that Millianism is true, Contextualism is true, or our intuitions regarding belief ascriptions are hopelessly inaccurate. As a consequence, my argument is a proof that either names and many general terms are Millian or our intuitions regarding belief ascriptions are hopelessly inaccurate.
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| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com jstor.org analysis.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Saul Kripke's puzzle about belief demonstrates the lack of soundness of the traditional argument for the Fregean fundamental principle that the sentences 'S believes that a is F' and 'S believes that b is F' can differ in truth value even if a = b. This principle is a crucial premise in the traditional Fregean argument for the existence of semantically relevant senses, individuative elements of beliefs that are sensitive to our varying conceptions of what the beliefs are about. Joseph Owens has offered a new argument for this fundamental principle, one that is not subject to Kripke's criticisms. I argue that even though Owens' argument avoids Kripke's criticisms, it has other flaws.
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| | Other links: interscience.wiley.com blackwell-synergy.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this paper, I argue against Millian Descriptivism: that is, the view that, although sentences that contain names express singular propositions, when they use those sentences speakers communicate descriptive propositions. More precisely, I argue that Millian Descriptivism fares no better (or worse) than Fregean Descriptivism: that is, the view that sentences express descriptive propositions. This is bad news for Millian Descriptivists who think that Fregean Descriptivism is dead.
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| | Other links: bdcaplan.com jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... How successful are Fregean theories compared with guise-theoretic Millian theories in dealing with a range of problematic propositional attitude ascriptions? The range considered is roughly that of Paderewski puzzles and their relatives. I argue that these fall into two categories: in one category, the Fregean theory looks to be under pressure from guise-theoretic rivals, though I argue that Fregeans can, to advantage, borrow some guise-theoretic machinery. Concerning the other category, which includes Kripke's two Paderewski puzzles, I argue that these puzzles are neutral between Fregean and Millian approaches; more generally, they have no direct bearing on semantics. Their solution requires correct views about rationality, self-knowledge and transparency.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Bryan Frances, Defending millian theories
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