Telling What She Thinks: Semantics and pragmatics of propositional attitude reports

Description

Frege’s puzzle concerning belief reports has been in the middle of the discussion on semantics and pragmatics of attitude reports: The intuition behind the opacity does not seem to be consistent with the thesis of semantic innocence according to which the semantic value of proper names is nothing but their referent. Main tasks of this book include providing truth-conditional content of belief reports. Especially, the focus is on semantic values of proper names. The key aim is to extend Crimmins’s basic idea of semantic pretense and the introduction of pleonastic entities proposed by Schiffer. They enable us to capture Frege’s puzzle in the analysis without giving up semantic innocence. To reach this conclusion, two issues are established. First, based on linguistic evidence, the frame of belief reports functions adverbially rather than relationally. Second, the belief ascriptions, on which each belief report is made, must be analyzed in terms of the measurement-theoretic analogy. Contents List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Part I: Introduction 1 The central problems 1.1 The story to be told 1.2 Propositional attitudes and their attributions 1.3 Type of attitude reports concerned 1.4 Opacity and contents of belief reports 1.5 The strategy of the project Part II: State of research 2 Structured propositionalism and its shared assumptions 2.1 Frege’s puzzle 2.2 Two types of solutions from structured propositionalism 2.2.1 Frege’s solutions 2.2.2 Millian transparency 2.3 Common acceptance of the assumptions 2.3.1 Eigenname view 2.3.2 Relation Account 2.4 Summary 3 Indirectness of speech and role of deixis 3.1 The crosslingual nature of Eigenname view 3.2 Evidence and arguments against the Eigenname view 3.2.1 Content clause is not an NP 3.2.2 Syntactic distinction between direct and indirect discourses 3.2.3 Summary 3.3 Content clause as an adjunct 3.3.1 Is the Japanese content clause adverbial complement? 3.3.2 Diculties 3.4 Content clause as a main clause 3.4.1 Deixis and indirectness of discourse 3.4.2 Hypothesis of the adjunct frame 3.5 Summary 4 Metaphysical status of propositional attitudes 4.1 Identity account and double duties of abstract content 4.1.1 Content as an abstract and public entity 4.1.2 Grasping abstract entities 4.1.3 Incompatibility of duties 4.2 Isomorphism and the problem of reading back 4.2.1 The Language of Thought hypothesis 4.2.2 Independence of the domains 4.2.3 Problems of reading back 4.3 Account of propositional attitudes without reading back 4.4 Decits of IUFs: Evaluation of the measurement-theoretic account 4.4.1 Idiolectal conclusion 4.4.2 Maximal elaboration and pragmatic nature of the linguistic domain 4.4.3 Recap: Nature of the representation domain 4.5 Hypothesis Part III: Communicational approach 5 Communicative framework and discursive opacity 5.1 The context of content determination 5.2 Pragmatic content determination 5.3 Opacity in the pragmatic analysis 5.3.1 Redening the opacity 5.3.2 Contexts for content determination and truth evaluation 5.4 Summary 6 Opacity as a feature of the frame 6.1 The opaque frame hypothesis 6.2 The hidden indexical theory 6.3 Paratactic account 6.3.1 Davidson’s analysis 6.3.2 Two problems of the paratactic account 6.3.3 Recap 6.4 Summary 7 Adverbial account of the frame 7.1 Linguistic supports for the adverbial account 7.2 Austinian semantics on transparency 7.3 Analysis of transparent belief reports 7.4 Analyzing the opacity 7.4.1 Recanati on opacity 7.4.2 Unstable contexts 7.4.3 Recap 7.5 Diculties of Recanati’s account 7.5.1 Transparency and stability of context 7.5.2 Mixed occurrences of singular terms 7.5.3 Epistemic state and content determination 7.6 Summary Part IV: The VarCA analysis 8 The VarCA Analysis 8.1 Two foci in reporting beliefs: Reexamining the example 8.2 Two types of VarCAs 8.2.1 Two distinct VarCAs 8.2.2 The VarCA analysis for transparent belief reports 8.2.3 The VarCA analysis for opaque belief reports 8.3 Summary 9 Consequences of the opaque VarCA 9.1 Coreference of proper names 9.2 Sameness of a name 9.3 Discursive opacity 9.4 Mixed belief reports and default transparency 9.5 Ontological hyperinflation 9.6 Summary Part V: Concluding remarks 10 Conclusion 10.1 Requirements for the VarCA analysis 10.1.1 Linguistic requirements 10.1.2 Pragmatic analysis 10.1.3 Requirement for truth evaluation 10.2 Extending the class of objectives List of sentences Bibliography Source of examples Source of linguistic data Index