Direct Belief: An Essay on the Semantics, Pragmatics, and Metaphysics of Belief

by Jonathan Berg

Jonathan Berg argues for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, Berg uses Grice's theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and goes on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted Inner Speech Picture of Thought. The work serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics.

167 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 16, 2012

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a neat book. Solution to Frege's puzzle: de re belief attributions in opaque contexts are not false, but trigger misleading implicatures. Which is a basically Millikanian idea. Interesting discussion of Recanati.