Pierre assents to both ‘Londres est jolie, ’ which can be translated into ‘London is pretty, ’ and ‘London is not pretty.’ Does he believe that London is pretty? This is Kripke's Puzzle. In order to create the puzzle, says Kripke, we need only the disquotational principle and the principle of translation, not the principle of substitutivity. But the principle of translation is also irrelevant, as the case of Paderewski illustrates.
Davidson calls into question the method of disquotation as an approach to the concept of truth, and his remarks apply to the disquotational principle above mentioned. It is the disquatational principle that brings about the puzzle. Davidson's holism suggests that disquotation is not the only way of ascribing beliefs. Therefore we are not in trouble at all because the disquotational principle does not hold. —a fact Kripke seems to ignore.
When Pierre moved to London and saw a part of the city which is not pretty, did he change his mind? We can treat this question in terms of belief revision. Pierre's ‘Londres’ and ‘London’ cannot both refer to the capital of England at the same time, given normal logical acumen. One of them must fail to refer to something in the actual world. Which does fail? We cannot decide. By the same token we cannot answer the question which of the two sentences is true: ‘Pierre believes that London is pretty’ and ‘Pierre believes that London is not pretty.’ What, then, should we say about the puzzle? Our latitude of choice in truth value redistribution and the inscrutability of reference make it impossible to decide whether or not Pierre believes that London is pretty. It is ineradicably indeterminate. In this way, I think that the title of Kripke's paper ‘A Puzzle about Belief’ is misleading, since it inclines us to assume that there is a single determinate solution.
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