Abstract
This paper concerns Kripke’s puzzle about belief. I have two goals in this paper. The first is to argue that two leading approaches to Kripke’s puzzle, those of Lewis and Chalmers, are inadequate as they stand. Both approaches require the world to supply an object that the relevant intentional attitudes pick out. The problem is that there are cases which, I argue, exhibit the very same puzzling phenomenon in which the world does not supply an object in the required way. The second goal is to draw out a more general lesson about Kripke’s puzzle. I argue that Kripke’s puzzle should be understood as intimately related to a phenomenon known as ‘intentional identity’, and that an adequate account of Kripke’s puzzle should be extensible to cases in which the relevant attitudes are empty (not, prima facie, about anything that exists).
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Notes
Given one interpretation of ‘pretty’, Pierre certainly does not have conflicting beliefs about London. London might be pretty in parts and not pretty in parts. Kripke intended Pierre’s beliefs to ascribe the property of being pretty and not pretty to London as a whole.
To say that an attitude is empty in this sense is not necessarily to say that it does not have content or truth conditions.
Lewis (1986, 34) briefly mentions a similar case involving Santa Claus being called both ‘Père Noël’ and ‘Santa Claus’.
Of course, there is a reading of (2) that implies that Chloe believes that her beliefs are about the same city, but we are concerned with the reading that does not have this implication.
The secondary content of these attitudes is presumably the empty set.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Daniel Nolan, Frank Jackson, David Chalmers, Alan Hájek, David Braddon-Mitchell, David Ripley, Philip Pettit, Pär Sundström, Clare Due, two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis, and an audience at the Australian National University for helpful feedback and discussion on the material in this paper.
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Sandgren, A. Puzzling Pierre and Intentional Identity. Erkenn 84, 861–875 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9984-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9984-9