Keeping track of individuals: Brandom’s analysis of Kripke’s puzzle and the content of belief

Author: Penco, Carlo¹

Source: Pragmatics & Cognition, Volume 13, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 177-201(25)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Abstract:

This paper gives attention to a special point in Brandom’s Making it Explicit. Brandom proposes in MIE a “Fregean” way out of Kripke’s puzzle about belief. In the first part, I analyze two main features of Brandom’s strategy, the definition of anaphoric chains as senses of proper names and the implausibility of the application of a disquotational principle to proper names. In the second part, I discuss (i) the problem of the stability of contents and (ii) the problem of sharing contents. I claim that Brandom’s strong holism leads to irresolvable difficulties with the concept of conceptual content as it emerges from the discussion of Kripke’s puzzle.

Keywords: anaphora; belief; context; disquotational principle; holism; idiolect; indexical; opacity; pronoun; translation

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1075/pc.13.1.13pen

Affiliations: 1: University of Genoa, Italy

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