Direct Reference, Psychological Explanation, and Frege Cases

Susan Schneider
Rutgers University


There has recently been much interest in the view that psychological explanation should be wide, that is, the view that psychological kinds fail to supervene on the intrinsic states of the individual.  Theories of wide content claim that content is individuated externally; theories of broad content, (as I am using the expression), in addition to this, take the basic semantic properties of thoughts to be denotation and truth.   Following Fodor, let us call the view that broad content is the only sort content that individuates psychological kinds, “Broad Psychology.”  Broad Psychology can be adopted by those sympathetic to Russellianism, the semantic view which claims, inter alia, that attitude ascriptions that differ only in coreferential expressions have the same meaning.  The Russellian about psychological explanation accepts this semantic view and adopts, in addition to this, the following claim about psychological explanation: beliefs differing only in containing coreferring expressions, although they may very well differ in mode of presentation, are to be treated by intentional psychology as being type-identical and are thereby subsumable under all the same intentional laws.

Frege's puzzle about belief ascription is a well-known problem arising for the purely semantic version of Russellianism.  Along similar lines, the Russellian about psychological explanation faces a related worry, the problem of what I will call, following Fodor, "Frege cases." Frege cases involve agents who lack knowledge of certain identities, where such knowledge is relevant to the success of their behavior, leading to cases in which the agents fail to behave as the broad intentional laws predict.  To cite a well-known example, Oedipus threatens to be a counterexample to the broad generalization: “(M) Ceteris paribus, if people believe that they shouldn’t marry Mother and they desire not to marry Mother, they will try to avoid marrying Mother” because, in virtue of trying to marry Jocasta, according to a broad psychology it is also true that Oedipus tries to marry Mother.    In this way Frege cases present Broad Psychology with putative counterexamples to its laws.

It is generally agreed that Frege cases are a major problem, if not the major problem, that Broad Psychology faces.  And the general view is that Broad Psychology is not faring well with respect to this problem.   However, I believe that this line of thinking is mistaken, and in this talk, I will proceed to outline a new solution to the Frege cases.