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Is Transparent Belief “Intolerably Odd” ?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
Extract
The ascription of beliefs and other propositional attitudes, as Russell called them, raises more than one philosophical puzzle as to how language is being used. A certain complexity is implied for these puzzles by W. V. Quine's relatively recent observation that propositional attitude (PA) ascriptions can be construed in two distinct ways. In particular, Quine distinguishes between what he calls transparent and opaque belief, and treatments of belief that ignore this distinction do so at their own considerable risk. However, while Quine's observation per se may help towards more circumspect solutions, what he goes on to say about transparent belief, as I will urge, adds a bogus puzzle to the real ones that confront us. For Quine holds that transparent belief is so very odd that to countenance its ascription, though he thinks that we must, brings us to the edge of nonsense. Parenthetically, I might say that I am myself mystified by his proposal to prevent our slipping over. This proposal can be ignored, however, if it can be shown that transparent PA ascription is far from nonsense. Elsewhere, I will try to show as much, but all that this paper aspires to is a negative preliminary: the refutation of Quine's main argument for his opposite stand.
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- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , December 1974 , pp. 647 - 655
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1974
References
1 Quine takes this stand in Word and Object, § 31, especially pages 148,9. I will identify passages quoted from this work by parenthesized page numbers.
2 Other statements of the Law characterize the intersubstitutable terms as ones that designate or refer to the same object. The two ways of stating it come to the same as long as designation or reference is seen as independent of linguistic context (as a function of term-types rather than of term-tokens). By making the reference of a term depend on its context, Frege and others have been able to regard “failures” of Leibniz's Law as merely apparent: it only seemed that we had two terms that referred to the same object. Some have seen this move as a refusal to face the facts, others as a promising start towards explaining them.
3 Quine credits Nelson Goodman with the insight that belief-ascriptions can call for the latter kind of construal — the transparent kind, as Quine comes to call it. In “On Denoting” (Mind, 1905), Russell's comments on the case of “a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first seeing it, remarked, 'I thought your yacht was larger than it is'” , and on the famous example that features George IV, Scott and Waverley, arguably indicate that he too discovered the transparent/opaque ambiguity, in what he, theorizing, calls “the ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences (of denoting phrases)”. Even if Russell was first, however, the ambiguity that he observed, perhaps because he did so little by way of separating observation from theory, was largely overlooked by philosophers until Quine found it again half a century later.
4 Taken as a summary, this paragraph does justice neither in scope nor in rigor to the discussion and definitions of Word and Object, § 30. It is meant not as a summary but as a reminder, and § 30 should be read by those who (logically) cannot be and those who simply have not been reminded.