Abstract

In his recent book, Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy (2024), Timothy Williamson argues that Saul Kripke’s (1979) puzzle about belief reveals no fundamental problem about our concept of belief. Instead, the puzzle shows that certain heuristics we rely upon in making judgments about belief are fallible.

In this talk, I will explore some aspects of Williamson’s framework of heuristics as it relates to attitude reports. A general theme will be that Kripke’s puzzle does put pressure on a certain concept of belief as a relation to a proposition and that the appeal to heuristics does not fully release this pressure.

As a result, when it comes to the semantics of attitude reports, Williamson’s anti-Fregean view may not be anti-Fregean enough.