Richard Heck, Jr. has recently (in ''Intuition and the substitution argument,'' Analytical Philosophy 2014) reconfigured the debate over Russellianism about proper names. Sidestepping the usual argument, which concerns ''intuitions'' about substitutions within ''that''-clauses, he proposes a new argument based on the claims that (i) beliefs are individuated by their psychological roles and (ii) ordinary language has belief-specifying locutions that reflect that individuation. Focusing on (ii) I argue that contrary to what Heck claims, ''that''-clause ascriptions are not the only candidates. In fact there are much better candidates: ascriptions involving direct quotations. I explain how the proposal is novel (it avoids the usual problems with such ascriptions) and how it answers the requirements of Heck's argument.More broadly what Heck's argument brings out is the diversity of resources ordinary language has for specifying beliefs; a defense of Russellianism needn't rest entirely on claims about ''that''-clause ascriptions.

It has proved challenging to account for the dual role that a directly quoted part of a 'that'-clause plays in so-called mixed quotation. The Davidsonian account, elaborated by Cappelen and Lepore, handles many cases well; but it fails to accommodate a crucial feature of mixed quotation: that the part enclosed in quotation marks is used to specify not what the quoter says when she utters it, but what the quoted speaker says when she utters it. Here I show how the Davidsonian can do better. The proposal rests on the idea that mixed quotation involves deferred demonstration: a mixed quotati on specifies what the subject says partly by demonstrating the quoter's utterance of the unquoted part and partly by deferred-demonstrating the subject's utterance of the quotation-marked part.

In Making It Explicit (1994) Robert Brandom claims that we may distinguish those linguistic expressions with object-representational purport — the singular terms — from others merely by the structure of their inferential relations. A good part of his inferentialist program rests on this claim. At first blush it can seem implausible: linguistic expressions stand in inferential relations to each other, so how could we appeal to those relations to decide on the obtaining of what seems to be relation between linguistic expressions and objects in general (viz., x purports to represent y)? It is perhaps not surprising then that Brandom's proposal fails. But it definitely is surprising how it fails. The problem is that in order to specify the sort of generality there is to an expression's inferential role, one must appeal to some version of the traditional distinction between extensional and nonextensional occurrences of expressions, and there appears to be no way to draw anything like that distinction in inferentialist terms. For the inferential proprieties governing the different occurrences an expression can have are so varied that they do not determine a binary partition of those occurrences.

I offer a philosophically well-motivated work-around for a problem that George Bealer ('Self-consciousness', Philosophical Review v. 106, 1997) has identified, which he claims is fatal to functionalism. The problem concerns how to generate a satisfactory Ramsey sentence of a psychological theory in which mental predicates occur within the scopes of other mental predicates. My central claim is that the functional roles in terms of which a creature capable of self-consciousness identifies her own mental states must be roles that items could play within creatures whose psychology is less complex than her own.

No abstract