Direct Reference and Belief Ascriptions

Belief ascription sentences amount to one of the majorconcerns of philosophers working on the theory of reference. Theproblem posed by the failure of co-referential proper names tosubstitute for one another salva veritate in the embedded 'that' -clauses of such sentences has vexed proponents of competingtheories of naming. The author undertakes, in his first twochapters, an examination of traditional views, namely Fregeanismand Sententialism, and finds them to be lacking on several counts.As a rival to such views, the direct reference movement hasattracted a great deal of praise. Still, direct reference is oftensaid to do a poor job of dealing with belief ascriptions. In thethird and fourth chapters of this book, the author argues that thedifficulties met by the most popular direct reference attempts todeal with substitutivity are due to their proponents' adherence tothe "Relational Paradigm" and goes on, in his final chapter, topropose Adverbialism as a nonrelational theory. This book should beof interest to philosophy students seeking an accessible overviewof the issues involved and as a novel contribution, in its ownright, to the study of the topic.