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.