Direct Belief: An Essay On The Semantics, Pragmatics, And Metaphysics Of Belief (mouton Series In Pragmatics)

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. Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: The instability of belief ascriptions (and how not to explain it) 1. From language to thought 2. Accommodating shifty intuitions 3. The appeal to ambiguity 3.1. Lexical ambiguity 3.2. Syntactic ambiguity 3.3. Multigrade status 3.4. The persistence of shifty intuitions 4. The indexical view 4.1. Implicit modes of presentation 4.2. Hidden-indexical semantics 4.3. Articulated indexicality 5. Semantic indeterminacy 5.1. Incompleteness 5.2. Similarity 5.3. Hopelessness 6. Direct belief 7. Summary Chapter 2: The pragmatics of substitutivity 1. Truth and appropriateness 2. Conversational implicature 3. Implicated normalcy 4. Normalcy for belief ascriptions 5. Variations on verbatim acceptability 6. Identity beliefs 7. Availability 8. Semantic intuitions 9. Iterability 10. Other pragmatic accounts of substitution failure 10.1. Soames and what is said 10.2. Thau and what is implicated 11. Summary Chapter 3: Conceptions, belief, and “inner speech” 1. The medium view of conceptions 2. The behavior problem 2.1. The problem 2.2. The Higher Order View of conceptions 2.3. A solution to the problem 3. Suspended belief 4. The inner speech picture of thought 5. Thinking in words 5.1. Silent uttering 5.2. Imagining 6. Two paradigms of belief 7. Summary References Index 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. Jonathan Berg, University of Haifa, Israel