Singular Propositions and Modes of Presentation

1. Recently a growing number of philosophers have either explicitly endorsed or been strongly sympathetic to some version of a directly referential, or Millian, semantics for ascriptions of propositional attitudes. It is not difficult to be attracted by the Millian view. On the one hand, rival views such as Davidson’s paratactic account or Frege’s cognitive account seem to face formidable difficulties. On the other, there are phenomena which are nicely accounted for by the Millian view. For instance, it deals rather well with so-called de re reports of attitudes; and it provides us with a convincing explanation of why, in a certain range of cases, substitutivity of coreferential terms within attitude constructions seems to be irresistible. The aim of this paper is to survey a number of features which are constitutive of the Millian account of attitude-ascription and which I take to be irremediably defective. The features in question, some of which have not been fully appreciated, relate mainly to the failure of that account to accommodate certain fundamental aspects of our ordinary practise of attitude attribution. I take it that one’s definitive method of assessment of a given semantical theory consists in checking out whether or not the theory is able to accommodate our pre-theoretical linguistic intuitions; to use Keith Donnellan’s phrase (Donnellan 1990, 204), such intuitions are the bottom line in philosophical argumentation about language. And I argue that the Millian appeal to modes of presentation taken both as semantically irrelevant and external to the singular contents believed, known, etc., as well as the associated pragmatic strategy employed to discard our ground-floor judgements, are insufficient to palliate the manifest implausibility of a number of Millian