Salmón, Schiffer and Frege’s Constraint

Abstract

AbstractIn his (Philosophical Perspectives 1:455–480, 1987) and (Noûs, 40:361–368, 2006), Schiffer devised a puzzle about Salmón’s (in: Frege’s puzzle, MIT Press, 1986a) Millian-Russellian theory of belief reports, which Salmón resolved in his (Philosophical Perspectives 3:243–285, 1989) and (Noûs, 40:369–375, 2006). My paper has three objectives. First, I will argue that the strategy employed by Salmón (in: Noûs 40:369–375, 2006) to solve Schiffer’s puzzle and his argument for such a strategy are disputable. Second, I will raise a new puzzle, inspired by ideas from Saul (in: Analysis 57:102–108, 1997) and Braun and Saul (in: Philos Stud 111:1–41, 2002), which achieves similar results to Schiffer’s puzzle but to which Salmón’s overall strategy for resolving the latter does not apply. Third, I will contend that the import of both puzzles is neither what Salmón maintains nor the alleged inadequacy of the Millian-Russellian semantics of belief reports as Schiffer suggests, but is the failure of Frege’s Constraint—a constraint to which several conceptions of modes of presentation, including Salmón’s (in: Frege’s puzzle, MIT Press, 1986a) in terms of guises and Schiffer’s (in: The things we mean, Oxford University Press, 2003) in terms of unstructured and fine-grained concepts/propositions, are committed.