On possible beliefs about actual dudes

Consider the following sentence.

(1) John believes that the actual king of Sweden is fat.

Lets assume that (1) is false, i.e. that John does not believe that the actual king of Sweden is fat. Although (1) is false it seems clear that it could have been true, i.e. the following sentence is true.

(2) Possibly, John believes that the actual king of Sweden is fat.

If this is correct then we require a semantic analysis of (2) on which it is true. What does the semantics of (2) look like then? Here are some candidates.

(i) exists w[in w, the actual king of Sweden is such that John believes that he is fat]

(ii) exists w[in w, John believes that the king of Sweden (in w) is fat]

(iii) exists w[in w, John believes that the actual king of Sweden (not in w) is fat]

My intuitions about what the right analysis of (2) is are very sketchy at best. (iii) would yield that (2) is false. But since we had some prima facie reason to think that (2) was true an advocate of (iii) should at least give us an explanation of where and why our intuitions are led astray. So if we assume that (2) is true we are left with (i) and (ii) both of which would yield (2) true (although for different reasons). (i) is true iff John could have had a de re belief about the actual king of Sweden, whereas (ii) is true iff John could have had a de dicto belief about the (possibly non-actual) king of Sweden. When I emphasize the ‘actual’ I get a de re feeling and when I don’t I get the de dicto feeling. So maybe it just depends on whether we are talking about de re belief or de dicto and then the analysis is (i) or (ii) respectively. But I can imagine some one saying, “No, we are talking about the possibility that John have a de dicto belief that the actual king of Sweden is fat”. In that case (iii) does start to look plausible. Perhaps our intuitions that (2) is true could be explain away as mistakenly reading (2) as either about the possibility that John have a de re belief about the actual king of Sweden or the possibility that John have a de dicto belief about the king of Sweden in w.

If this is right then it shows that if A does not believe (de dicto) that the actual F is G, then it is not possible that A believe (de dicto) that the actual F is G. Like I said my intuitions here are sketchy so I’m not sure if this is a bad thing. But it would mean that a descriptivist theory that equates the semantics of names with rigidified descriptions has a problem (see Soames (1998)).

The problem is that if the above is correct and names are semantically equivalent to rigidified definite descriptions and A does not believe (de dicto) that n is G, then it is not possible that A believe (de dicto) that n is G.

[*this post is inspired by ideas found in Soames and Chalmers]