Some Lessons from Kripke’s <i>A Puzzle About Belief</i>

Abstract

The literature on Kripke’s A Puzzle About Belief has delivered convincing answers to the problem raised by Kripke. This is so both for referentialists and descriptivists. In this article I consider what I take to be the best responses of both parties and what we can learn from these responses. I argue, firstly, that the most basic cleavage when considering the semantics of belief-attribution is between theories that claim content to be transparent and theories that do not, secondly, that such substitutivity-puzzles cannot be of much use in deciding the issue between referentialist and descriptivist theories of belief-attribution and, thirdly, that the most basic challenge facing the descriptivist is to come up with a notion of content on which such content is epistemically transparent.