Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to many interesting logical and semantic problems. Attitude Problems presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are made using intensional transitive verbs such as 'want', 'seek', 'imagine', and 'worship'. Forbes offers a theory of how such verbs work that draws on ideas from natural language semantics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics.

In English, we use the word "I" to express thoughts that we have about ourselves, and we use the reflexive pronouns "himself" and "herself" to attribute such thoughts to others. Philosophers and linguists call such thoughts, and the statements we use to express them, de se. De se thoughts and statements, although they appear often in our day-to-day lives, pose a series of challenging problems for both linguists and philosophers. This interdisciplinary volume examines the structure of de se thought, various (...) issues concerning the semantics and pragmatics of our discourse about it, and also what it reveals about how humans think about themselves and the world around them. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 209 Seiten: 397-418.

A Linguistic Analysis of Prior, Quine, and Searle on Propositional Attitudes, Martinich on Fictional Reference, Taglicht on the Active/Passive Mood Distinction in English, etc.

This paper develops a concept of structural linguistic injustice. By employing the so-called structural-injustice approach, it argues that individuals' seemingly harmless language attitudes and language choices might enable serious harms on a collective level, constituting what one could call a structural linguistic injustice. Section 1 introduces the linguistic-justice debate. By doing so, it establishes linguistic diversity as the context in which phenomena such as individuals' language attitudes, language choice, and language loss occur. Moreover, the paper illustrates (...) why employing the structural-injustice approach might be beneficial for the linguistic-justice debate. Section 2 conceptualizes individuals' (certain types of) language attitudes and language choice as (objectionable) social structures. Section 3 provides a concept of structural linguistic injustice. Section 4 suggests one possible remedy for structural linguistic injustice. Section 5 concludes the paper. (shrink)

This book makes a stimulating contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. It begins with a spirited defence of the view that propositions are structured and that propositional structure is 'psychologically real'. The author then develops a subtle view of propositions and attitude ascription. The view is worked out in detail with attention to such topics as the semantics of conversations, iterated attitude ascriptions, and the role of propositions as bearers of truth. Along the way (...) important issues in the philosophy of mind are addressed. Though intended primarily for professional philosophers and graduate students the book will also interest cognitive scientists and linguists. (shrink)

Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitions – for example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecture – for example, as (...) a case study of how consciously inaccessible subpersonal processes give rise to conscious states, or as a candidate example of cognitive penetrability? What methodological issues arise concerning how linguistic intuitions are gathered and interpreted – for example, might some subjects' intuitions be more reliable than others? And what bearing might all this have on philosophers' own appeals to intuitions? This paper surveys and critically discusses leading answers to these questions. In particular, we defend a ‘mentalist’ conception of linguistics and the role of linguistic intuitions therein. (shrink)

In the autumn of 1959, Arne Naess and J. L. Austin, both pioneers of empirical study in the philosophy of language, discussed their points of agreement and disagreement at a meeting in Oslo. This article considers the fragmentary record that has survived of that meeting, and investigates what light it can shed on the question of why the two philosophers apparently found so little common ground, given their shared commitment to the importance of data in the study of language. Naess (...) and Austin held different views about two significant aspects of the relationship between scientific method and philosophical investigation. The first aspect concerns the nature of experimental data; Naess used the statistical analysis of data collected from non-philosophical informants while Austin advocated deliberation leading to agreement over usage by a few skilled experts. The second aspect relates to their respective attitudes to the role of theory in philosophical inquiry, attitudes which drew on discussions of scientific method, and its relevance to philosophy, from the early decades of the twentieth century. This article traces the evidence for these views on scientific method in Naess’s and Austin’s respective published work, and in the record of their Oslo meeting. It concludes with a brief overview of opinions about scientific method manifest in the decades since that meeting in various branches of linguistics. These opinions speak to the enduring importance of attitudes to scientific method in relation to our study and understanding of human language. (shrink)

This paper proposes an account of linguistic knowledge in terms of knowing-how, starting from Love's seminal distinction between first-order linguistic activity and second-order (or metalinguistic) practices. Metalinguistic practices are argued to be constitutive of linguistic knowledge. Skilful linguistic behaviour is subject to correction based on criterial support provided through metalinguistic practices. Linguistic know-how is knowing-how to provide and to recognise criterial support for first-order linguistic activity. I conclude that participation in first-order linguistic activity (...) requires a critical reflective attitude, which implies that all first-order linguistic activity has a second-order dimension. -/- . (shrink)

Karttunen observes that a presupposition triggered inside an attitude ascription, can be filtered out by a seemingly inaccessible antecedent under the scope of a preceding belief ascription. This poses a major challenge for presupposition theory and the semantics of attitude ascriptions. I solve the problem by enriching the semantics of attitude ascriptions with some independently argued assumptions on the structure and interpretation of mental states. In particular, I propose a DRT-based representation of mental states with a global (...) belief-layer and a variety of labeled attitude compartments embedded within it. Hence, desires and other non-doxastic attitudes are asymmetrically dependent on beliefs. I integrate these mental state representations into a general semantic account of attitude ascriptions which relies on the parasitic nature of non-doxastic attitudes to solve Karttunen’s puzzle. (shrink)

Linguists often advert to what are sometimes called linguistic intuitions. These intuitions and the uses to which they are put give rise to a variety of philosophically interesting questions: What are linguistic intuitions – for example, what kind of attitude or mental state is involved? Why do they have evidential force and how might this force be underwritten by their causal etiology? What light might their causal etiology shed on questions of cognitive architecture – for example, as (...) a case study of how consciously inaccessible subpersonal processes give rise to conscious states, or as a candidate example of cognitive penetrability? What methodological issues arise concerning how linguistic intuitions are gathered and interpreted – for example, might some subjects' intuitions be more reliable than others? And what bearing might all this have on philosophers' own appeals to intuitions? This paper surveys and critically discusses leading answers to these questions. In particular, we defend a ‘mentalist’ conception of linguistics and the role of linguistic intuitions therein. (shrink)

Human attitudes about killing nonhuman animals are complex, ambivalent, and contradictory. This study attempts to elucidate those attitudes through a linguistic analysis of the terms used to refer to the killing of animals. Whereas terms used for killing human beings are highly specific and differentiated on the basis of the motivation for the killing, the nature of the participants, and evaluative and emotional content, terms used for killing animals are vague and interchangeable. Terms for animal-killing often background aspects of (...) the act, making it more palatable to humans. When a term is extended from use with humans to use with animals, it lends a connotation of compassion and mercy to the killing. When a term is extended from use with animals to use with humans, it gives the killing a connotation of brutality. These findings reflect assumptions about the human "right" to take animals' lives while serving to ameliorate the negative feelings such killings evoke. (shrink)

In the classic Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts,Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish advocated the idea that to perform an illocutionary actoften just means to express certain attitudes. The underlying definition of attitudeexpression, however, gives rise to serious problems because it requires intentions of a peculiarkind. Recently, Wayne Davis has proposed a different analysis of attitude expression whichis not subject to these difficulties and thus promises a more plausible account of illocutions.It will be shown, however, that this account (...) is too weak since it does not exclude cases wherethe utterer merely pretends to perform an illocutionary act. Davis' analysis also callsinto question a weaker doctrine widely held among speech act theorists by suggesting that, inorder to perform an illocutionary act, it is not even necessary to express mental states. (shrink)

Propositional attitude reports are sentences built around clause-embedding psychological verbs, like Kim believes that it's raining or Kim wants it to rain. These interact in many intricate ways with a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena, and represent one of the most important topics at the interface of linguistics and philosophy, as their study provides insight into foundational questions about meaning. This book provides a bird's-eye overview of the grammar of propositional attitude reports, synthesizing the key facts, (...) theories, and open problems in their analysis. Couched in the theoretical framework of generative grammar and compositional truth-conditional semantics, it places emphasis on points of intersection between propositional attitude reports and other important topics in semantic and syntactic theory. With discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a useful guide to symbols and conventions, it will be welcomed by students and researchers wishing to explore this fertile area of study. (shrink)

The most common account of attitude reports is the relational analysis according towhich an attitude verb taking that-clause complements expresses a two-placerelation between agents and propositions and the that-clause acts as an expressionwhose function is to provide the propositional argument. I will argue that a closerexamination of a broader range of linguistic facts raises serious problems for thisanalysis and instead favours a Russellian `multiple relations analysis' (which hasgenerally been discarded because of its apparent obvious linguistic implausibility).The (...) resulting account can be given independent philosophical motivations within anintentionalist view of truth and predication. (shrink)

I investigate when we can (rationally) have attitudes, and when we cannot. I argue that a comprehensive theory must explain three phenomena. First, being related by descriptions or names to a proposition one has strong reason to believe is true does not guarantee that one can rationally believe that proposition. Second, such descriptions, etc. do enable individuals to rationally have various non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and admiration. And third, even for non-doxastic attitudes like that, not just any description will (...) allow it. I argue that we should think of attitude formation like we do (practical) choices among options. I motivate this view linguistically, extending "relevant alternatives'' theories of the attitudes to both belief and to the other, non-doxastic attitudes. Given a natural principle governing choice, and some important differences between doxastic and non-doxastic "choices'', we can explain these puzzling phenomena. (shrink)

The need to study the concept of “politeness” from the point of view of its linguistic and cultural nature is caused by the desire to study the national identity of speech etiquette in different cultural spaces and conditions. The aim of the work was to form an idea about the specifics of the implementation and understanding of the concept of “politeness” in the Uzbek information field. In this study, the following methods were used: contextual, conceptual, communicative, linguocultural, analytical-synthetic, and (...) comparative. This study is focused on the study of key lexical meanings (stylistically neutral and marked, basic and additional) that are within the functional-semantic field of the concept “politeness.” With the help of contextual study of different variants of the use of the lexeme, the meanings were distributed in the conceptual structure (core, near and far periphery). Also, the key etiquette formulas representing the originality and national-specific features of the Uzbek linguocultural tradition were considered. The importance of politeness in the information space of Uzbekistan is assessed, including with the help of both positive and negative associations, that is, from an axiological point of view. Speech etiquette and linguistic formulas were considered from the point of view of the influence of social, cultural, and political values of the Uzbek people. In the process of analyzing the lexical layer, the boundaries of the functional-semantic field of the concept “politeness” were determined: from the principles of communication and a set of rules of etiquette to the strategy of obtaining benefits from communication and insincere attitude. In the future, this work can be used for comparative analysis of the conceptual structure of politeness with models presented in other close and distant languages, comparison of speech etiquette and linguistic formulas in different national cultures. (shrink)

In the appendix to Psychosemantics, entitled ‘Why There Still has to be a Language of Thought,’ Jerry Fodor offers several arguments for the language of thought thesis. The LOT, as articulated by Fodor, is a thesis about propositional attitudes. It comprises the following two claims: propositional attitudes are relations to meaning-bearing tokens — for example, to believe that P is to bear a certain relation to a token of a symbol which means that P; and the representational tokens in question (...) are quasi-linguistic — in particular, they have the constituent structure appropriate to a language. (shrink)

Several different Bayesian models of epistemic utilities (see, e. g., [37], [24], [40], [46]) have been used to explain why it is rational for scientists to perform experiments. In this paper, I argue that a model-suggested independently by Patrick Maher [40] and Graham Oddie [46]-that assigns epistemic utility to degrees of belief in hypotheses provides the most comprehensive explanation. This is because this proper scoring rule (PSR) model captures a wider range of scientifically acceptable attitudes toward epistemic risk than the (...) other Bayesian models that have been proposed. I also argue, however, that even the PSR model places unreasonably tight restrictions on a scientist's attitude toward epistemic risk. As a result, such Bayesian models of epistemic utilities fail as normative accounts-not just as descriptive accounts (see, e. g., [31], [14])-of scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Thirteen seminal essays by Mark Richard develop a nuanced account of semantics and propositional attitudes. The collection addresses a range of topics in philosophical semantics and philosophy of mind, and is accompanied by a new Introduction which discusses attitudes realized by dispositions and other non-linguistic cognitive structures.

Schlenker (Semant Pragmat 2(3):1–78, 2009; Philos Stud 151(1):115–142, 2010a; Mind 119(474):377–391, 2010b) provides an algorithm for deriving the presupposition projection properties of an expression from that expression’s classical semantics. In this paper, we consider the predictions of Schlenker’s algorithm as applied to attitude verbs. More specifically, we compare Schlenker’s theory with a prominent view which maintains that attitudes exhibit belief projection, so that presupposition triggers in their scope imply that the attitude holder believes the presupposition (Karttunen in Theor (...) Linguist 34(1):181, 1974; Heim in J Semant 9(3):183–221, 1992; Sudo in The art and craft of semantics: a festschrift for Irene Heim, MIT Press, 2014). We show that Schlenker’s theory does not predict belief projection, and discuss several consequences of this result. (shrink)

The analysis of knowledge and belief has provoked intensive discussions in philosophy and linguistics. One of the issues in this area is the semantics of attitude verbs whose complement expresses a thought about the Self of the thinking person. What is the content of my belief when I think that I am tired? Some philosophers propose it is a proposition, others think it is a property. It will be shown in this essay that existing proposals in either direction are (...) unsatisfying. The property theorist expells the subject of the predicate "tired" from the analysis; their theory is at best incomplete. The propositionalist has difficulties with the analysis of the pronoun that refers back to the subject of the attitude, as is the case with "he" in "Wolfgang believes he is tired". The present new proposal ventures the idea that a conscious person is endowed with their own Logical Space that deviates from the standard model in providing for a separate entity, the Self, as the object or target of inner thoughts about oneself. Moreover, this Logical Space leaves room for linguistic error: in such a model, subjects may be unable to correctly identify the reference of a name or may fail to identify the Self with its bearer. By contrast, reference to the Self is immune to error through misidentification, it is a paradigm case of brute indexicality. In consequence, de se pronouns are rigid designators in the sense of Kripke. The book solves several puzzles of reference failure and explores numerous consequences for the semantics of attitude reports and for possible world semantics in general. (shrink)

Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of (...) 30 propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination task and an ordinal scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally. (shrink)

The nature of linguistic understanding is a much-debated topic. Among the issues that have been discussed, two questions have recently received a lot of attention: (Q1) ‘Are states of understanding direct (i.e. represent solely what is said) or indirect (i.e. represent what is said as being said/asserted)?’ and (Q2) ‘What kind of mental attitude is linguistic understanding (e.g. knowledge, belief, seeming)?’ This paper argues that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, there is no straightforward answer to either (...) of these questions. This is because linguistic understanding cannot be identified with a single mental attitude towards a particular representation. Instead, we should characterize states of linguistic understanding as involving complex representational structures generated by a dual-stream process. The first stream operates on direct representations of what is said, while the second operates on representations of what is said as being said/asserted by a given source. Both these streams feed a situation model, i.e. a complex representation of a state of affairs described by a given piece of discourse. (shrink)

This paper critiques the view, widely held by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, that psychological explanation is a matter of ascribing propositional attitudes (such as beliefs and desires) towards language-like propositions in the mind, and that cognitive mental states consist in intentional attitudes towards propositions of a linguistic quasi-linguistic nature. On this view, thought is structured very much like a language. Denial that propositional attitude psychology is an adequate account of mind is therefore, on this view, (...) is tantamount to eliminative materialism, the denial that human beings are thinking beings. -/- I dispute this on the basis of recent work in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Mental models theory, on which thought is better understood as nonpropositional intentional psychology, accords better with the evidence and offers an alternative view to propositional attitude psychology -- one that means that the denial that that is propositional is not eliminative. However, I argue that propositional attitude psychology is a useful idealization, as classical mechanics is of relativity theory, strictly but not radically false, and useful for prediction and indeed, as long as its idealized character is born in mind, for explanation of behavior. (shrink)

The thesis concerns itself with the selection constraints governing the basic distributional patterns of five complement constructions in English--the bare clause, the that-clause, the interrogative, the concealed question construction and the exclamative complement--across a wide array of knowledge, belief and communication predicates. The relevant distributional phenomena--which predicates are capable of embedding which complement types--have traditionally been captured by stipulative grammatical markings such as subcategorization frames, semantic selection frames and case-theoretic lexical markings. These theoretical tools, even to the extent that they (...) successfully reduplicate the observed phenomena, are of no explanatory value, as they do not derive the different behavioral patterns from some independently established properties of the embedding predicates or their complements. In the thesis, I present an epistemically-based theory, which attempts to derive the relevant distributional phenomena, including those traditionally assumed to reflect hard-core syntactic idiosyncrasies, from a linguistic-epistemic theory of knowledge, belief and communication. ;The theory is based on a lexical-semantic analysis of the embedding predicates, according to which they denote ternary relations between agents, objects of attitude and objects of representation. Thus, to give an example, the predicate think denotes a ternary relation between a thinker, a thought mentally represented by the thinker, and a proposition expressed by the thought and believed by the thinker to be true. This analysis, developed on linguistic grounds for linguistic purposes, echoes some of the recent insights in the philosophy of mind, especially Crimmins . Coupled with a theory of the meanings of the different complement types--partially based on the formal semantic insights of Karttunen , Groenedijk and Stokhof and Ginzburg --this account derives the distributional patterns from simple considerations of semantic compatibility: those predicates which are capable of embedding a certain complement type are exactly those whose lexical semantics is compatible with the semantics of the complement. ;Some of the distributional patterns discussed in the thesis, especially the one involving concealed questions, have traditionally been taken to provide empirical support for the hypothesis of the autonomy of syntactic representations . The analysis presented in this thesis reveals the dramatic extent to which the semantics and the syntax of lexical selection are transparent to each other, and thus implies, at least with respect to the core domain of lexical selection, that the autonomy hypothesis is empirically unjustified. (shrink)

I consider difficult data involving the interaction of attitudes and conditionals, specifically non-doxastic attitude expressions like 'regret'. I first show that felicitous attitude conditionals in "ignorance contexts", where the relevant person doesn't know the antecedent is true, give rise to a number of difficult problems given widely held assumptions in semantics. I then argue that, even so, we should expect these conditionals to be true and reasonable to utter in ignorance contexts, given certain other kinds of attitude (...) construction that tend to involve free relatives like `whatever'. I then use that observation to explain many of the more puzzling aspects of these conditionals, and to show that we should treat felicitous doxastic attitude conditionals differently from felicitous non-doxastic ones. I leave explaining felicitous doxastic attitude conditionals for future work, but offer constraints on a satisfying explanation of them. (shrink)

In this paper I examine an argument that there is a serious tension between the claim that for natural languages linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said and the relational analysis of attitude-reports. I conclude that it is possible to avoid the tension by adopting a pluralism about meaning and expression.

This paper consists of two main parts and a coda. In the first part I present the ''binding theory'' of presupposition projection, which is the framework that I adopt in this paper (Section 1.1). I outline the main problems that arise in the interplay between presuppositions and anaphors on the one hand and attitude reports on the other (Section 1.2), and discuss Heim''s theory of presuppositions in attitude contexts (Section 1.3).In the second part of the paper I present (...) my own proposal. To begin with, I define an extension of DRT in which attitude reports can be represented (Sections 2.1–2.2). I then argue that the verb believe triggers a certain presupposition and that, given the binding theory, this presupposition determines the projection behaviour of the verb (Section 2.3). This analysis yields predictions which are incomplete in the sense that they do not fully account for speakers'' intuitions about presuppositions and anaphors in belief contexts. In Section 2.4 I suggest that this is as it should be because we may assume on independent grounds that there is a class of plausibility inferences which complement the predictions of the presupposition theory. Finally, the analysis is extended to the verb want (Section 2.5). (shrink)

This paper is an exposition as well as a critical examination of M. Frank's response to the Derrida/Searle debate. It argues that Frank's critique of Derrida and Searle is partly justified but suffers from a number of shortcomings. The author agrees with Frank's argument that Derrida fails to explain how linguistic meaning is possible on the basis of purely differential relations between signs (différance) and supports his view that the human subject, in spite of its lack of complete self-transparency, (...) is endowed with more autonomy and semantic creativity than Derrida is willing to grant it. The paper tries to show, however, that much of Frank's critique of linguistic theory as represented by the work of Searle is unjustified because it is informed by a questionable notion of linguistic determinism rooted in Schleiermacher and Saussurean structuralism, a notion of ineffable or non-conceptual individual meaning that remains insufficiently explicated, and a generally anti-naturalist attitude towards language which leads to a misunderstanding of the role linguistics and related cognitive sciences can (and cannot) play in the hermeneutic sciences. (shrink)

Much recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence for continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form ‘x remembers/imagines p’). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb 'remember' is surprisingly similar to that of the verb 'imagine'. This (...) holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between 'remember' and 'imagine'. I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining. (shrink)

I argue that penal philosophy should focus more on our attitudes towards offenders, since these attitudes can shed new light on theories or principles of punishment (of which they are often expressions) and also play a significant role in changing the face of criminal justice. Building on Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” I define attitudes as certain ways of seeing human beings that logically include or exclude various emotional, behavioral, and linguistic responses, that can be more or less natural, and (...) over which we have some degree of voluntary control. I argue that, understood in this sense, there are broadly speaking six attitudes towards offenders: the retributive, the hostile, the moralistic, the paternalistic, the merciful, and the actuarial. After presenting each of these attitudes, I sum up my analysis by focusing on the Polanski sexual abuse case. I then introduce the concept of second-order attitudes, where egalitarianism is the attitude that consists of taking the same attitude towards all offenders, and particularism is the attitude that consists of adjusting your attitude to each offender. Finally, I briefly explain why a mix of the retributive and the merciful should be our default attitude. (shrink)

This book shows that the semantic analysis of modal notions of possibility and necessity can be used to enhance our understanding of the interpretation of reports of belief or emotional state. It introduces intuitive notation and terminology to express ideas in modern theories of modal interpretation that are normally represented in complex logical formulas, effectively updates the 1960s-era link between possible worlds and the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions, and reconciles two disparate views of the role of events in (...) semantic interpretation, that of Donald Davidson and that of David Lewis. It reduces a host of variable behaviors of propositional attitude ascription to an intuitive and precise distinction between ascriptions that merely express a commitment to propositional content versus ones that attribute a mental state to the holder of the propositional attitude. This leads to an explanation of the nature and effects of the language disorder of fluent aphasia. (shrink)

This paper concerns two points of intersection between de se attitudes and the study of natural language: attitude ascription and communication. I first survey some recent work on the semantics of de se attitude ascriptions, with particular attention to ascriptions that are true only if the subject of the ascription has the appropriate de se attitude. I then examine – and attempt to solve – some problems concerning the role of de se attitudes in linguistic communication.

This thesis deals with the phenomenon of attitude reporting. More specifically, it provides a unified semantics of de re and de se belief reports. After arguing that de se belief is best thought of as a special case of de re belief, I examine whether we can extend this unification to the realm of belief reports. I show how, despite very promising first steps, previous attempts in this direction ultimately fail with respect to some relatively recent linguistic data (...) involving quantified and infinitival reports, logophoric constructions, and monstrously shifted indexicals. Formalizing my idea of a contextual resolution of acquaintance relations in a dynamic framework, I arrive at an alternative analysis that handles all these data. (shrink)

The critical linguistic analysis of authorial stance in English news reporting has long been concerned with uncovering the ideological bias embedded in the seemingly objective and neutral representation of people and events. Interest has recently shifted towards the nature of the authorial voice itself and the extent to which this semblance of objectivity is also typical in non-English reporting. This article explores to what extent the most impersonal ‘reporter voice’, as identified by Martin and White in English hard-news reported (...) in the press, is present in Italian reporting. The ‘appraisal’ categories developed by Martin and White are used, discussed and adapted for this purpose. Attention is thereby also given to significant expressive resources that may not be retrievable from English material alone. Similarities and differences in reporting styles are discussed and reference is made to the social and cultural variables that may underlie them. (shrink)

Verbs such as know, believe, hope, fear, regret and desire are commonly taken to express an attitude that one may bear towards a proposition and are therefore called verbs of propositional attitude. Thus in (1) below the agent Cathy is reported to have a certain attitude.

Propositional relationalists about the attitudes claim to find support for their view in what they assume to be the dyadic relational logical form of the predicates by which we canonically attribute propositional attitudes. In this paper I argue that the considerations that they adduce in support of this assumption, specifically for the assumption that the that-clauses that figure in these predicates are singular terms, are suspect on linguistic grounds. Propositional relationalism may nonetheless be true, but the logical form of (...) attitude predicates provides no grounds for thinking this to be so. (shrink)

We can characterise thought in two different ways. Which is preferred can have implications for important issues about reasoning and the norms that govern cognition. The first, which owes much to the picture of the mind encountered in Descartes' Meditations, observes that paradigmatic examples of thoughts and inferences are events and processes whose special characteristics stem from their being ‘mental’ occurrences. For example they are conscious or, if unconscious, they stand in some special relation to thought processes that are conscious. (...) They typically involve attitudes towards contents or propositions. In general, thoughts have a distinctive onto-logical status and this status depends upon their being mental and typically conscious. The second emphasises that thought is a kind of activity with a definite function. It involves the use of intelligence to solve problems, answer questions, make plans and so on. Thought should be studied as a kind of goal-directed activity. Those interested in the norms that govern thought should attend to the role of responsible disciplined reflection in carrying out this activity. (shrink)

The singular term theory maintains that that-clauses are complex singular terms which designate propositions. Though extremely well-supported, the theory is endangered by the existence of oblique that-clauses; that is, that-clauses occurring in what appear to be nonargument positions (e.g., ‘Lola was upset that Slick Willy had all the fun’). In this paper I argue that the best solution to the problem consistent with the singular term theory, invokes a construction-based grammatical theory. Such an approach challenges traditional views of semantic compositionality (...) by rejecting a central dogma of semantics, namely, that linguistic constructions contribute only trivial logical or quasi-logical information to semantic interpretation (e.g., function-application relations). (shrink)

Buddhist scholars in the West broadly agree with the proposition that Buddhism has a philosophical tradition, in many respects comparable to Western ones, while many claim that it also has a practical or empirical dimension that Western philosophies, especially the analytic tradition, lack. There is also a scholarly consensus that an implicit metaphysical system serves as the foundation for the doctrines and practices of early Buddhism as represented in the Pāli suttas. However, Buddhist scholarship to date has not distinguished clearly (...) between philosophical speculations, on the one hand, and on the other, teachings based on experience and practice. This study explores early Buddhist texts’ concept of “domain” (viṣaya/visaya, 境界), which encompasses both an experiential domain and a linguistic framework; i.e., a word is only valid within its own domain, and fails to refer beyond it. As such, it closely resembles Rudolf Carnap’s ideas of “internal” and “external” questions regarding linguistic frameworks, and his suggestion that metaphysical questions, considered as external questions, are meaningless and cannot be answered. More specifically, the Buddha’s refusal to directly answer the “unanswered” questions may indicate that early Buddhism took an attitude similar to Carnap’s rejection of metaphysics. Moreover, textual evidence suggests that teachings such as impermanence and dependent origination, though they may appear to be “metaphysical” to modern readers, are in fact empirical in the context of the early suttas. (shrink)

The expansion of commerce between the Chinese and Persian states, and the re-establishment of caravan routes, helped make possible the arrival of the first Manichaean missionaries to China in the seventh century of our era. Thus, in 694, a Persian with the title of fuduodan appeared before the Chinese court carrying “the false religion contained in The Book of the Two Principles,” Erzongjing. In 719 another Manichaean dignitary, bearing the title of muzhu and versed in astronomy, was sent to the (...) Chinese emperor by the viceroy of Tokharestan. Some twenty years later, on 16 Jul, 731, a Manichaean Bishop, also called a fuduodan, completed the Compendium of the Doctrines and Rules of the Religion of Mani, the Buddha of Light. The resulting edict, which required the translation of this work, was designed to allow the Chinese authorities both to obtain a complete overview of Manichaeism and to indicate what attitude to take in its regard. Accordingly, the next year (732), an edict was promulgated which, while condemning Manichaeism, granted religious freedom to its non-Chinese adherents. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how the language spoken in a country can affect individual attitudes about gender equality and subsequently the level of legal rights afforded to women. This is because the feature of a language—specifically whether it requires speakers to make gender distinctions—can perpetuate popular attitudes and beliefs about gender inequality. To test this argument, we first identify a correlation between the gender distinction of a language and individual gender-based attitudes among World Values Survey respondents. We then isolate (...) the causal mechanism using an experiment involving bilingual Romanian–Hungarian speakers in Transylvania, Romania. Finally, we examine one observable implication of our argument: the effects of gender distinction of official state languages on women’s rights at the national level. Our results confirm the importance of the gender distinction of language on support for gender equality and women’s rights. (shrink)

From the late seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, an important shift occurred in attitudes to the arbitrariness of the first human words. While authors such as Locke and Pufendorf emphasized linguistic arbitrariness and human liberty, mid-eighteenth-century thinkers highlighted the natural aspects of language and the limited scope of freedom and reason. This change is linked to the contemporary view of the cultural world as a natural artifice, strongly molded by social and environmental factors. The article highlights (...) hitherto neglected similarities between Leibniz’s ideas on language and mid-eighteenth-century theories, by contrast to the usual focus on Locke. (shrink)

Abstract: In this brief commentary, I focus on two issues, first on Moltmann’s proposed Davidsonian event semantics for transitive verb attitude predicates, and second on the import of what she calls ‘the underspecification of content’ for the proper semantic interpretation of that-clauses. With respect to the first of these issues, I question the empirical justification of her proposed semantics, suggesting that she needs a syntactic rationale for her semantics. With respect to the second issue, I question whether, as she (...) claims, the that-clauses in transitive verb attitude predicates specify (or even partially specify) the truth or satisfaction conditions for the attributed attitudes. (shrink)