In Defense of Formal Relationism

In his paper “Flaws of Formal Relationism”, Mahrad Almotahari argues against the sort of response to Frege’s Puzzle I have defended elsewhere, which he dubs ‘Formal Relationism’. Almotahari argues that, because of its specifically formal character, this view is vulnerable to objections that cannot be raised against the otherwise similar Semantic Relationism due to Kit Fine. I argue in response that Formal Relationism has neither of the flaws Almotahari claims to identify. Suppose Bill believes: (T) Twain is an author. (~T) Twain is not an author. Then Bill is irrational. In what does his irrationality consist? It is tempting to answer that it consists in his believing something whose negation he also believes. But consider Sally, who believes both (T) and: (~C) Clemens is not an author. Then, if one regards the contents of these beliefs as Russellian—as, in particular, individuated, so far as the subject term is concerned, in terms only of the object of belief—then Sally too believes something whose negation she also believes. And yet she may, for all we have said, be a model of epistemic virtue. That, of course, is a form of Frege’s Puzzle, which is widely taken to be one of the most important objections to Russellian accounts of psychological content. The general worry is that content plays a certain sort of explanatory role, and Frege’s Puzzle seems to show that it cannot play that role if content is Russellian. In recent years, however, a new way of approaching this problem has emerged. The idea is to concede