Proper Names and Belief Reports

John Stuart Mill said of proper names that they are " . . . not connotative; they denote the individuals who are called by them, but they do not indicate or imply any attribute as belonging to those individuals." The sole semantic function of names on this view is to denote an individual, not to say anything about that individual. It follows from this that two proper names which refer to the same individual are semantically equivalent. The only semantic function they perform is exactly the same. One consequence of this is that coreferring names can be substituted in a sentence without changing what the sentence expresses. Let us henceforth call the thesis that co-referring names can be so substituted the substitutivity thesis. Gottlob Frege held a view much like Mill's in his earlier work. He rejected it, however, at least in part because he was convinced that the substitutivity thesis created insuperable problems in accounting for certain data of cognitive significance. In this paper I shall begin by very briefly considering a Fregean objection to the substitutivity thesis. I shall then argue that the objection does not give us good grounds for rejecting the Millian thesis. I shall do so by offering an analysis of belief that allows us a plausible interpretation of the Fregean data that is consistent with a Millian position on proper names and substitutivity.