Direct Reference and Belief Ascriptions

Belief ascription sentences amount to one of the major concerns of philosophers working on the theory of reference. The problem posed by the failure of co-referential proper names to substitute for one another salva veritate in the embedded 'that'-clauses of such sentences has vexed proponents of competing theories of naming. The author undertakes, in his first two chapters, an examination of traditional views, namely Fregeanism and Sententialism, and finds them to be lacking on several counts. As a rival to such views, the direct reference movement has attracted a great deal of praise. Still, direct reference is often said to do a poor job of dealing with belief ascriptions. In the third and fourth chapters of this book, the author argues that the difficulties met by the most popular direct reference attempts to deal with substitutivity are due to their proponents' adherence to the "Relational Paradigm" and goes on, in his final chapter, to propose Adverbialism as a nonrelational theory. This book should be of interest to philosophy students seeking an accessible overview of the issues involved and as a novel contribution, in its own right, to the study of the topic.