Aboutness and Justification

Al believes that Marie Curie was a chemist. That is: Al has a belief he could express by saying, Marie Curie was a chemist. Here is a fact about Al’s belief: it is about someone, namely Marie Curie. Betty has a belief that she could express by pointing to a particular cup and saying, That cup is empty. Betty’s belief is also about something: the particular cup she is pointing at. These beliefs are both beliefs that are, in some sense, about objects. Let us call such beliefs singular beliefs. The general question Imogen Dickie addresses in Fixing Reference (Dickie 2015) is this: what makes it the case that a given singular belief is about the object that it is about? What makes Al’s belief a belief about Marie Curie? What makes Betty’s belief a belief about that particular cup? Dickie’s answer to this general question is not easy to summarize quickly, but the rough idea is that the object that a singular belief is about is the one that plays a certain role in the justification of that belief. Aboutness is to be explained in terms of justification. This is a novel and interesting idea. But there is potential worry for how Dickie develops it. Dickie understands doxastic justification in terms of truth-conduciveness. And given the close relationship between the conditions under which a belief is true and what the belief is about, one might be concerned that her account is circular. This issue is discussed at greater length below. Dickie adopts a broadly Fregean approach to beliefs (although this is perhaps mostly for the sake of smooth exposition). Belief (types) are individuated by propositions, where propositions are structured entities consisting of ‘conceptual representations’ (1, 25). Where α is a singular term, and Φ a one-place predicate, the content of the belief that a particular agent could express by uttering the sentence “α is Φ” is denoted by “〈α is Φ〉”. Dickie restricts her discussion to what she calls “ordinary thoughts.” An ordinary thought is a thought about “an ordinary material thing of the kind standardly made available by perceptual contact with such a thing; understanding of a proper name referring to it; or grasp of a mundane description that it satisfies” (22–23). This cup, Marie Curie, and the man who broke the bank at