Philosophical Studies 146 (2):249 - 267 (2009)
|Abstract||Russellianism is characterized as the view that
‘that’-clauses refer to Russellian propositions, familiar set-
theoretic pairings of objects and properties. Two belief-
reporting sentences, S and S*, possessing the same Russellian
content, but differing in their intuitive truthvalue, are
provided. It is argued that no Russellian explanation of the
difference in apparent truthvalue is available, with the upshot
that the Russellian fails to explain how a speaker who asserts S
but rejects S* can be innocent of inconsistency, either in what
she says or, at least, in what she implicates. Yet, while there
is no semantic or pragmatic explanation of the substitution
failure consistent with Russellianism, there remains the
possibility of a purely psychological explanation that is,
nonetheless, Russellian. This is an attractive option. It comes
at a cost, however, since, in abandoning the project of
providing a semantic or pragmatic explanation of anti-
substitutiv