• The upshot of §VI is that the Fregean account of belief-of is in no worse a position than Quine’s with respect to the puzzling case encapsulated in (32) and (33). Just as they do not imply (34), the Fregean (35) and (36) do not imply (37) (because there is no one term α for which Ralph believes both ⌜α is a spy⌝ and ⌜α is not a spy⌝). But even if outright contradictory beliefs are not implied, the example is puzzling. Saul Kripke posed a version in which the two terms are proper names that are very closely related: a French boy, Pierre, who has heard good things about a place called ‘Londres’ and believes ‘Londres est jolie’ (i.e., ‘London is pretty’) moves there with his family and, before learning that it is the place called ‘Londres’ in French, comes to believe, as he learns English, ‘London is not pretty’. Pierre then seems to believe both ‘London is pretty’ and ‘London is not pretty’ (though, of course, he would not say, in either French or English, that it is both).

• Section VII concerns another puzzle concerning the operation of “exportation” that Quine used to move from (26) to (29). The point of using the definite description ‘the shortest spy’ is that Ralph’s other beliefs mean that ‘Some spy exists’ implies ‘The shortest spy exists’; and, as was noted by Geach when discussing Russell, the latter is all we need in order to conclude ‘The shortest spy is a spy’. When this is combined with exportation, we able move from (9) to (10) even though the latter was supposed to say much more than the former.

Kaplan’s reference on p. 193 to “essentialism all over again” alludes to Quine’s criticisms of quantifying into contexts formed by modalities like ‘necessarily’. You’ve seen Kaplan note these criticisms with regard to (7). Quine assumed that someone who asserted (7) would not wish also to assert (42) (i.e., ‘Nine is such that necessarily it is the number of planets’), and distinguishing the two would require holding that some ways of referring to the number capture what it is necessarily while others don’t. Such an argument is what led him to ascribe to philosophers not sharing his doubts about necessity the “frankly inequalitarian attitude” mentioned in the quotation at the beginning of the next section.

• One way of adopting this attitude is sketched in §VIII with regard to modality as a prelude to Kaplan’s latter development of it with regard to belief. Since standard names are attached to their references necessarily, necessary truths stated using them express necessary properties of the things they refer to.

Although Kaplan doesn’t regard all proper as standard names, he says that others have. The “some others” he mentions may well include Kripke since Kaplan will acknowledge Kripke’s ideas later in his footnote 24, but the reference to Russell is surprising. Those of you in the first half saw Russell emphasize that most of what we refer to we can refer to only by way of definite descriptions (so that ordinary names must have descriptive content). In fact, Russell did recognize names which had no descriptive content, and these are what he was ready to label “logically proper names,” but he also said that we could not grasp such names in the case of other people since we know them only indirectly through descriptions of them. So what Kaplan says could be misleading if it is taken to suggest that Russell took proper names of persons to ordinarily refer to them directly. Indeed, Russell’s most clearly stated examples of “logically proper names” are the demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’ applied to the content of our immediate experience (e.g., patches of color), and the only analogous names of persons would be ‘I’ or ‘me’.