Do Anti-Individualistic Construals of Propositional Attitudes Capture the Agent’s Conceptions?

Burge 1986 presents an argument for anti-individualism about the propositional attitudes. On the assumption that such attitudes are “individuated by reference to intentional notions”, Burge presents a novel thought experiment in an attempt to show that “there are certain relations between an individual and the environment that are necessary to @the thinker’s# having certain intentional notions” ~Burge 1986 p. 709!. The novelty of the thought experiment was that, unlike Burge’s previous thought experiments, it did not appeal to “incomplete understanding or ignorance of specialized knowledge” ~709!. Rather, the case for anti-individualism in his 1986 involves an agent who forms a “nonstandard theory” regarding the subject-matter of his thought. The 1986 thought experiment, however, has come under criticism for relying on a faulty view of the role of sentences occurring within the scope of a propositional-attitude operator. Burge assumes that in attitude-ascribing sentences of the form ‘S Fs that p’, ‘that p’ serves both to specify the truthconditions of S’s F-attitude but also to characterize the ‘notional’ components of S’s F-attitude ~see Burge 1979b, p. 538!. That is, Burge endorses the de dicto reading of such attitude-ascribing sentences; and the objections of both Bach 1988 and Elugardo 1993 take aim at this aspect of Burge’s argument. In this paper I defend Burge against these critics by identifying a faulty assumption common to both. This is the assumption that there must always be a non-trivial characterization of an agent’s conceptions, that is, a characterization which does not employ the word~s! used by the agent in her expression of that conception. My claim is that we have reason to reject this NOÛS 36:4 ~2002! 597–621