Short Version Do Belief Reports Report Beliefs?

The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this " Specification Assumption " , that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuitively more plausible approach to the semantics of belief reports. But this approach must confront a puzzle of its own: it turns out that every case is a Paderewski case, at least potentially. My thesis is very simple: belief reports do not report beliefs. But that needlessly sounds paradoxical. What I mean is that a belief report does not do quite what it appears to do, namely, say what someone believes. That is, it does not specify what the person believes but merely describes it. (1), for example, though true, (1) The Joker thinks that Bruce Wayne is a wimp. does not specify something the Joker thinks. For if it did do that, then (2) would be true too, (2) The Joker thinks that Batman is a wimp. since the proposition that Batman is a wimp is the same (singular) propo-215