De re attitude reports: Some current problems and discussions

This critical review presents the current state of the art in the approaches to semantic analysis of attitude reports. The authors present to the reader who is not familiar with the technicalities of the contemporary formal linguistic theory the essence of the de re and de dicto attitude reports as they were originally presented in the seminal work of Bertrand Russell. They continue with a discussion of the so-called double-vision scenarios discovered by Willard Quine and show how they are a problem of a compositional semantic analysis. Then the authors move on to discuss the most influential approaches towards accounting for de re attitude reports. The overview centers on the approaches by David Kaplan, David Lewis, Irene Heim, Orin Percus and Uli Sauerland. It is shown that a number of original syntactic problems, as well as problems with compositionality were solved in the most recent and influential theory of concept generators. Yet, the authors point out a number of problems that still remain unsolved. One such problem is the so-called flexibility of attitude verbs that stipulates their ability to combine with arguments with potentially any complexity. For some, it may seem as a technical glitch of the theory. Yet, the authors point out that any theory that could avoid type-flexibility and yield the same results as the theory of concept generators would be preferable. A second problem pointed out by the authors is more substantial. It has to do with counterexamples that cannot be captured by the standard approaches, in principle. The authors provide such examples. They are the so-called reports about a disjunctive attitude in which an attitude holder believes or desires something or other, but both of desires can be said to relate to one and the same individual, from the speaker's perspective. The speaker is thus justified to attribute the overall desire or believe of the attitude holder to this individual, ignoring the fact that the attitude holder herself does not know that either disjuncts of her disjunctive desire are attributable to one and the same individual. This setup creates a de re attitude reports that cannot be captured in terms of a standard approach in terms of concept generators because this approach fails to meet one requirement of these examples: make sure that different concepts can be applicable in different attitude alternatives of the attitude holder. In other words, in order to account for reports about disjunctive attitudes, no single concept generator can be sufficient. The authors observe that this kind of problem goes beyond just the theory of concept generators, and targets all the neo-Kaplanian approaches because it questions the correctness of the popular philosophical assumption that underlies these approaches: whether the attitude holder must be somehow acquainted with the object of which the de re report is made and that the attitude holder must have a certain unique description for this object by which she should apply in each of her attitude alternatives.

Keywords

Authors

References