An analysis of King's problems with belief individuation

Abstract

In this paper I will take the proposal of Jeffry C. King in his book The nature and Structure of Content (King 2007) and raise the objection that his proposal has some problems in individuating some beliefs in an accurate way. In doing so we will see that there seems to be a tension between fulfilling this role and at the same time the role of being what different vehicles with the same content have in common. In this book King's main purpose is to provide an account of propositions playing basic explanatory roles, among which is that propositions are the content or object of beliefs and other propositional attitudes (King 2019, 2). This entails that if the critique of this paper is correct, it would show a partial failure of King's purposes and therefore the critique, if accurate, would be entirely relevant. For this purpose, I will present King’s proposal in the first section. In the second section I will present the objection that his propositions can fully perform the task of being the content of propositional attitudes. In the third section we will explore ILFs as a possible way out of the problem and consider their shortcomings and in the fourth section we will consider an alternative solution that avoids the problems of ILFs but, as we shall see, has its own difficulties.