Millianism, Propositional Attitude Reports, and Relational Semantics

The linguistic behavior of proper names in propositional attitude contexts is one of the most resisting problems for the Millian approach to the semantics of proper names. Puzzles of Frege and Kripke are two examples of these problems. The advocates of Millian approach provide many different solutions for these puzzles. In this paper, after a brief survey of these solutions, I attempt to provide a new and unified solution to these puzzles. This solution is based on Kit Fine’s new approach to semantics of proper names, which is called Relational Semantics. I will argue that this new solution both is committed to Millian framework and satisfies our intuition about propositional attitude contexts and the nature of puzzles.