Abstract

A prime shaping force in current and not so current problems and puzzles in the philosophy of belief is the distinction between the de dicto and de re belief modalities. A very vivid current expression of this is the primacy of the de dicto modality in Saul Kripke's puzzle about belief. An earlier and subtler expression is in Alonzo Church's 1950 translation argument. In both of these, de dicto comes in the form of a principle called disquotation, which says basically this: if a believer is competently, reflectively and sincerely disposed to assent to a given sentence s, then she believes de dicto that s. To believe de dicto that s is to be related--in a precise way to be described in the theory--to the complete propositional content that s. ;My thesis is an extended argument against disquotation. The aim is to show how the underlying deep issue in both the puzzle and the translation argument is disquotation. The generalization is that any philosophical problem setting with disquotation as an essential component is thereby problematic. The argument is on two fronts. On one, there is development of the nonuniformity hypothesis, which says that belief modalities are each cross cut by a deep conceptual distinction also found in various forms across the belief theory literature. I use nonuniformity to show how disquotation shapes the puzzle about belief. On another front, I argue directly against disquotation: that it is not an intuitively attractive principle and that indeed real life belief reporting tells against it. The overall argument is unified by showing how nonuniformity can be used to explain real life belief reporting. ;A projected possible repercussion of my general argument is that since disquotation is based in the belief modality distinction that distinction may not mark the right natural kinds for belief theory. At least, the ubiquity of the content distinction that is postulated by nonuniformity points to a need to recognize it as an important candidate for foundational status in our theory of belief