Heimir Geirsson

In recent years Russell’s view that there are singular propositions, namely propositions that contain the individuals they are about, has gained followers. As a response to a number of puzzles about attitude ascriptions several Russellians (as I will call those who accept the view that proper names and indexicals only contribute their referents to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which they occur), including David Kaplan and Nathan Salmon, have drawn a distinction between what proposition is believed and how it is believed. While it is generally agreed upon among Russellians that this distinction needs to be drawn there is considerable disagreement as to what exactly the distinction amounts to and what role the what and the how should play. The most plausible option seems to be to not assign a semantic value to the cognitive role played by the name or indexical in the sentence assented to. But recently Mark Richard has attempted to make the cognitive role affect truth values by building it into the truth conditions of belief reports. I will argue that Richard’s attempt fails to satisfy our pretheoretical intuitions about the sharing of beliefs. Furthermore, and more surprisingly, I will argue that Richard’s theory makes it virtually impossible for us to judge whether or not most belief reports are true or faIse, since doing so would involve what I call RAM probing, which would require viewing elements that are essentially private.

This new, second edition of the popular college textbook offers the beginning philosophy student a comprehensive introduction to several aspects of one of the most influential schools of thought in the twentieth century. Professor Klemke begins by pointing out the distinctions among the various types of analytic and linguistic philosophies, while emphasising that they all arose as a response to the formerly predominant school of absolute idealism. After a prologue section containing a representative exposition of idealism by Josiah Royce, the following sections show the radically new philosophical approach of the analytic school in its various guises: realism and common sense (G. E. Moore); logical atomism (Bertrand Russell); logical positivism (A. J. Ayer); conceptual analysis (Gilbert Ryle, G. E. Moore, John Wisdom); logico-metaphysical analysis (Gustav Bergman, W. V. Quine); linguistic analysis (J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, J. R. Searle); and the recent development of new realism (Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, Richard N. Boyd).

The relations between our cognitions and what they are about have been much discussed in recent decades. A popular view used to be that the relation between a cognitive state and what it is about is a contingent affair, namely that my cognitive state might have been just as it actually is in the absence of the object it is of, or in the presence of a qualitatively identical object as the one it is of. A second position, one more in vogue now, is that we can distinguish between a wide and a narrow content, where the wide content is dependent on the object it is of while the narrow content is not. Ori Simchen rejects both of these views. Instead, he argues, there is a necessary connection between a cognitive episode and the object it is of. There are no narrow contents. Further, a name is necessarily of the object it names. There are natural kinds and individuals have essences that restrain the way they might be. Necessities abound.

The general topic of this work is the information value of declarative sentences containing proper names. I begin by accepting the direct designation theory of names. The theory, however, does not appear to be able to account for the difference in information value between sentences like 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' and 'Hesperus is Hesperus'. In order to explain this difference I develop an account of belief that takes a novel approach to the contents of beliefs of propositions expressed by such sentences. ;If you have a de re attitude towards a proposition, you can believe it in several different ways. The difference corresponds to the various ways in which you can mentally represent the object in the proposition. I account for this difference by introducing a distinction between the information basis of a sentence, which is the proposition expressed by the sentence, and the information value of the sentence, which is a subjective notion that depends on how one understands the sentence. ;The implication of the theory on the relationship between the necessary and the a priori is significant. I agree with Kripke that true identity statements containing different codesignative names express necessary propositions, but we disagree on the epistemic status of those propositions. While he argues that they can be known only a posteriori, I argue that they also can be known a priori. Regarding sentences like 'stick S is one meter long', I disagree with Kripke, and argue that although we cannot know this a priori, there is a closely related sentence that qualifies as an example of the contingent a priori, namely 'the length S appears to have is one meter'