THE SEMANTICS OF BELIEF ASCRIPTIONS

Michael McKinsey, Wayne State University (V-B))

My paper concerns the meaning and logical form of cognitive ascriptions. The dominant view, first proposed by Frege (1892) has been that a sentence of the form 'S believes that p' ascribes a mental relation (in this case the relation of believing) between the person S and proposition that p. (Thus, the sentence 'Lois believes that Superman can fly' says that Lois bears the relation of believing to the proposition that Superman can fly.) But recent work in semantics in support of the direct reference theory of names undermines the relation-theory of cognition, since when the two theories are combined, it follows that substitution of co-referring names in cognitive contexts preserves truth value, and this consequence is counterintuitive. (For instance, it surely seems that it could be true that Lois believes that Superman can fly and yet false that Lois believes that Clark Kent can fly, even though the names 'Superman' and 'Clark Kent' refer to the same man.) Recent defenders of the combined view try to explain away these counterintuitions, but I will argue that these explanations fail. I will also present additional evidence against the relation-theory and develop an alternative (non-relational) theory of cognition that is based on the concept of linguistic meaning, instead of on the concept of a proposition.