Understanding Belief Reports

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In this paper, I defend a well-known theory of belief reports from an important objection. The theory is Russellianism, sometimes also called neo-Russellianism, Millianism, direct reference theory, 'Fido'-Fido theory, or naive theory. The objection concerns substitution of co-referring names in belief sentences. Russellianism implies that any two belief sentences that differ only in containing distinct co-referring names express the same proposition (in any given context). Since 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' both refer to the planet Venus, this view implies that all utterances of (1) and (2) express the same proposition and have the same truth value.'