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Semantics in the Twilight Zone

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Naming, Necessity, and More
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Abstract

In ‘A Puzzle about Belief’ Saul Kripke tells the tale of Pierre, whose pronouncements regarding his urban likes and dislikes have become legendary. But the final conclusion of Kripke’s paper seems to remain widely unknown, misunderstood, or neglected. In the last paragraph of the paper Kripke concludes that the case of Pierre ‘lies in an area where our normal apparatus for the ascription of belief is placed under the greatest strain and may even break down’. This is the area David Kaplan has dubbed ‘the Twilight Zone’. In this chapter I shall try to clarify what the Twilight Zone is, how we get into it, and what we should do about it.

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© 2014 Jonathan Berg

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Berg, J. (2014). Semantics in the Twilight Zone. In: Berg, J. (eds) Naming, Necessity, and More. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400932_7

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