The Beliefs and the World: On Hintikka's Objections to Quine

Abstract

In “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes” (1956), Quine makes a distinction between the ‘notional’ and ‘relational’ meanings of the psychological operators. This distinction reappears, in different garb, in Word and Object (1960), this time as between the opaque and transparent senses of expressions of propositional attitudes. The opaque interpretation has been the central theme in semantics with a logical slant since Frege, due to the fact that the opaque contexts resist the application of elementary logical rules, such as the substitutivity of identity and existential generalization. Save some notable exceptions, the tenacious presence of psychological sentences whose analysis requires the applicability of these rules was overlooked. From Frege to Carnap, psychological expressions were condemned to total opacity; in the chapter of Meaning and Necessity (1947) devoted to ‘sentences about beliefs’, Carnap díd not even mention the possibility of a different analysis. This situation changes with the publication of “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes,” which rescues the transparent interpretation from oblivion, calls attention to its extraordinary importance, and proposes a notational device bound to facilitate its logical manipulation.

In this article, I examine two objections made by Jaako Hintikka to Quine’s proposal. I intend to show that they are based on an incorrect evaluation of the possibilities offered by Quinean notation, whose flexibility and expressive strength are far greater than what a polemic reading might suggest. For reasons I will omit here, I use the ‘de dicto – de re’ dichotomy instead of the distinction in terms of ‘opacity’ and ‘transparency’, although the texts quoted keep their original terminology.

[Summary by Thomas M. Simpson]