Can Lois Lane Believe Clark Kent Is Strong?
A reporter, a hero, and a problem with names
Lois Lane is a reporter for the Daily Planet. She works alongside a mild-mannered journalist named Clark Kent. She also admires — and often interviews — the superhero Superman. What Lois does not know is that Clark Kent and Superman are the same man. When she sees Clark stumble, she thinks, “That guy is not strong.” When she sees Superman lift a car, she thinks, “He is so strong.” She would happily say:
- “Superman is strong.”
- “Clark Kent is not strong.”
No one would call Lois crazy for holding both thoughts. But here is the catch: “Superman” and “Clark Kent” refer to the exact same person. So both sentences point to the same man and the same property (being strong). If that is true, how can Lois rationally accept one and reject the other? And even trickier — when we report Lois’s beliefs, we naturally say:
- “Lois believes that Superman is strong” — true.
- “Lois believes that Clark Kent is strong” — false.
But if the names refer to the same person, why can’t we simply swap one name for the other inside those belief reports? This is Frege’s Puzzle, named after the German philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925). It is a puzzle not just about Superman stories, but about what words contribute to thought and how we talk about what people believe.
Frege’s fix: every name has a hidden side
Frege noticed something odd. If the only job of a name were to pick out an object, then swapping “Superman” for “Clark Kent” in any sentence shouldn’t change anything. After all, the train is still the same train. Yet when we step inside Lois’s mind, the swap seems to flip truth to falsehood.
Frege’s solution was to say that a name has two layers. The reference is the real-world object the name points to — the man himself, the person in the cape and the suit. But a name also has a sense — a way the object is presented, a sort of mental path to that object. “Superman” presents the man as the flying hero; “Clark Kent” presents that same man as the clumsy reporter. The reference is the same, but the senses are different.
Frege made a bold claim about belief sentences. He argued that when a name appears inside “believes that…,” it does not refer to its ordinary reference. Instead, it refers to its ordinary sense. So inside “Lois believes that Superman is strong,” the word “Superman” refers to Lois’s hero-mode of thinking about the man. That explains why swapping in “Clark Kent” changes the truth value: inside the belief report, the two names are now about different modes of presentation, so they are not co‑referring at all. This move preserves the idea that you can only substitute expressions with the same reference — it’s just that the reference has shifted.
Frege’s account also explains why “Superman is strong” and “Clark Kent is strong” feel different to Lois even when they are plain facts about the world. The sentences have the same reference (both are true of the same man), but they express different senses. Cognitive value — what the sentence means to a thinker — depends on sense, not just reference.
Words that wiggle out of the finger trap
Frege’s two‑layer picture is elegant, but it ran into trouble when philosophers looked at words like “I,” “you,” “here,” and “now” — indexicals, whose reference changes depending on who speaks and when. Suppose Bob says, “Alice believes that I will solve a physics problem.” Bob’s “I” refers to Bob. But to make the report true, does Alice need to think of Bob using a first‑person sense — the kind of sense Alice would express with “I”? That would mean Alice believes she herself will solve the problem. But that isn’t what Bob meant at all. Frege’s claim that belief reports always indicate the believer’s own mode of presentation seems to get the wrong result.
A second problem is variability of sense. Different people associate different senses with the same name. You may think of “Bob Smith” as the kid who sits in the back row; someone else thinks of him as the guitarist in a band. If a belief report with the name “Bob Smith” must capture the believer’s particular sense, then it is hard to see how one sentence — “Many people believe Bob Smith will be famous” — could ever be true for a whole crowd. The crowd’s senses of “Bob Smith” aren’t identical.
Some Fregeans reply by loosening the requirement: a belief report is true if the believer thinks of the object in a way that is suitably similar to the ascriber’s sense, not identical. Still, finding a middle ground between “exactly the same sense” and “just any old way of picking out the referent” has proven tricky. These wrinkles don’t bury Frege’s insight, but they do push later philosophers to look for other answers.
Direct reference and the messy mind
A rival camp, inspired by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and developed by thinkers like John Perry (b. 1943) and Nathan Salmon, starts from a different intuition. These neo‑Russellians claim that some thoughts are directly about objects — the thought simply has that object as a part of its content, a singular proposition. When you think “Superman is strong,” the proposition contains the actual Superman, not a mental description of him.
If that is right, then the proposition Lois grasps when she thinks about Superman is exactly the same proposition she rejects when she thinks about Clark Kent — because the object is identical. Call this Naive Russellianism. It faces an obvious shock: it must say that “Lois believes Clark Kent is strong” is true even though Lois would angrily deny it. How can that not make her irrational, believing both a proposition and its opposite?
The answer lies in splitting what is believed from how it is believed. Lois believes the singular proposition that Clark Kent is strong when she holds it under her “Superman” way of thinking; she believes the negation of that same proposition when she holds it under her “Clark Kent” way of thinking. She is in two distinct belief states — different mental files, so to speak — so her rationality is safe. What normally leads us to call the report false is that an utterance of “Lois believes Clark Kent is strong” pragmatically suggests she would accept the sentence “Clark Kent is strong” — and she wouldn’t. The false suggestion is a pragmatic implicature, not part of the sentence’s literal truth.
Naive Russellians must explain why our intuitions scream “false” so loudly. They argue we unconsciously bundle two jobs when we report beliefs: stating what is believed (the singular proposition) and hinting at the way the believer grasps it. Because those hints are usually reliable, we mistake a bad hint for an outright lie. The puzzle then becomes a lesson about the difference between what a sentence encodes and what a speaker merely conveys in context.
Kripke’s twist: translation and two Paderewskis
Saul Kripke (1940–2022) showed that Frege’s puzzle does not depend on any special theory of names. He invented a new character. Pierre is a French speaker who grows up hearing that “Londres” is pretty. He moves to London but lives in an ugly neighborhood without learning the English name for the city. He picks up English by immersion and sincerely says, “London is not pretty.” Using the very same principles that drive the Lois case — translate his French belief, then report his English belief — we seem forced to say Pierre both believes London is pretty and believes it is not pretty, without being irrational. The conflict arises from translation and context, not from substituting names.
Kripke also gave the Paderewski puzzle. A man named Peter knows of a famous pianist named Paderewski and a famous politician named Paderewski, never realizing they are the same person. He believes Paderewski (the musician) had musical talent and Paderewski (the politician) did not. Again, a single name with one reference generates contradictory belief reports through Peter’s split mental files. These cases tell us that the real engine of Frege’s Puzzle is not names themselves but the way minds can hold information in separate compartments.
Why it still matters when you say “she thinks”
You run into Frege’s Puzzle every day. A friend says, “My brother thinks I’m lazy, but he doesn’t think [their real name] is lazy.” In an online game, you may describe another player’s belief using their screen name, not knowing their real identity. If we couldn’t handle these switches smoothly, we’d be constantly tripped up in ordinary conversation.
Philosophers today continue to argue because the stakes are high. If Frege is right, then the mind always deals in richly detailed senses, and the world is never quite directly in our thoughts. If Russellians are right, our thoughts hook right onto things and people, and the puzzle is just about how we report those thoughts, not about the thoughts themselves. If contextualists are right, the truth of a belief report shifts with the situation — much as “I” shifts depending on the speaker.
Understanding this puzzle helps you see how language, mind, and reality intertwine. The Superman case is not just a comic‑book curiosity; it is a window into what it means to think about a person, to share that thought with words, and to be responsible in how you represent someone else’s mind.
Think about it
- If you discover that your online friend “NightHawk” is actually your neighbor Sam, does it suddenly become true that you earlier believed Sam is a good strategist? Why or why not?
- Imagine a device that could read minds and display exactly what proposition a person is thinking, stripped of all ways of thinking about it. Would a jury still need to hear the person’s own words before deciding what they believed?
- Can you think of a situation where telling someone “You believe that X” would be literally true but so unhelpful that it counts as a lie in practice? Where should we draw the line?
