Belief and intentionality

As far as I can see, most proposed solutions to Kripke’s puzzle about belief fall under two separate headings. In the first case, it is usually argued that the difference between the two (apparently contradictory) beliefs of the Kripke’s Pierre lies in their content (whether this content be conceptual, cognitive or even semantic); in the second case, we are told that Pierre has two different objects in mind, which the two beliefs are respectively addressed to. In both cases, doubt is thrown upon the legitimacy of the two intuitively valid principles which, according to Kripke, are applied, respectively, to assenting to a sentence (principle of disquotation) and to sentences themselves (principle of translation). According to many proposals, the ascription of a contradiction to Pierre’s different beliefs would be due to the misapplication of either principle to the sentences Pierre assents to. Let us put aside, for the moment, the first kind of solution, which is somewhat unsatisfactory in that it doesn’t answer the objections raised by Kripke in Naming and Necessity to any so-called descriptivist point of view in the theories of reference and propositional attitudes. What I consider strange in the “object”-solution is the fact that it seems to beg the question so far as Kripke himself concedes that Pierre fails to realize that his beliefs are direeted upon the same object; in fact, the point is that for Kripke the puzzle subsists even in spite of this failure of Pierre’s. Nobody seems to have attributed particular importance to this which is perhaps one of the reasons why both kinds of solution tend merely to read Kripke’s puzzle in the light of the old Quinean (and Fregean) one about the failure of substitutivity of coreferring expressions within intensional contexts. In what follows, I shall try to have my cake and eat it; that is, both to defend an “object”-solution of the puzzle and to follow, at least up to a certain extent, Kripke when he says that his puzzle cannot simply be reduced to the Quinean one. My main purpose in agreeing with Kripke about the specificity of his puzzle is to show the central importance of it as to the problem of reference globally considered. Being convinced that Kripke’s puzzle arises only from the inside of both a realistic and a causal theory of reference, I hold that its very existence constitutes a very perspicuous clue to the fact that a new starting point is needed in dealing with that problem. It would be clear from the most cursory reading of his paper that Kripke is persuaded (as are many others) that belief and other similar contexts which are expressible in any so-called propositional attitude cannot reveal anything conclusive in the analysis of referring expressions - particularly, proper names - and that therefore the issue must be settled in connection with extensional as well as modal contexts. In my opinion, Kripke is somewhat defensive about his puzzle. The purpose of his puzzle, in fact, is to show that belief contexts are essentially puzzling and hence neither of the existing competing theories can make use of its own analysis of these contexts as far the general question of reference is concemed. Thus he concludes that his own theory about reference (as outlined in Naming and Necessity) is unaffected by the analysis of these contexts, suggesting by implication that his theory works better than other ones for extensional and modal contexts. In my opinion, however, the more a theory reveals itself capable of explaining belief contexts (and similar epistemic ones), the more it can be applied to the understanding of the remaining contexts too. My reason for saying this is that when belief contexts are focused on, it becomes easier to appreciate the close link which, in my opinion, subsists between referring and what I shall call the constitution of objectivity. I think that an analysis of this link - thoroughly overlooked by the Kripkean theory of reference (and by many other semantic theories as well) - is necessary to understand what “to refer to something” - or, what I take as an alternative way of indicating the same thing, to have at one’s disposal an object as an intentional one - means.