Acquaintanceless De Re Belief

Robin Jeshion

What are the conditions on having a de re belief about a concrete object? One widespread view is that a necessary condition for having such a belief is that the believer be in some way acquainted with the object of belief. A canonical variety of acquaintance to concrete obejcts is a perceptual relation. But many think that this is not the only variety of acquaintance for concrete objects. They think that we can have de re beliefs about objects with which we do not ourselves perceive. So long as others have perceived them, and we are related to those individuals by a communication-chain, we too are, in an extended sense, acquainted with the objects. In this paper I challenge the traditional condition of acquaintance. I attempt to argue that in cases in which an agent is entirely unaquainted with an object (i.e., no one has ever been related in the canonical way to the object), the agent can still have a de re belief about the object. Descriptive reference-fixing -- as in Leverrier's reference-fixing of "Neptune" as the planet causing the perturbations in Uranus's orbit -- is the key mechanism for securing such de re belief.