Belief in Context: Towards a unified semantics of de re and de se attitude reports

• Ph.D. thesis. Defended November 30, 2006 (Cum Laude). Dept. of Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen
• Promotor: Rob van der Sandt; co-promotor: Bart Geurts
• Thesis committee: Jeroen Groenendijk, Marc Slors, Ede Zimmermann
  • Defense: + Reinhard Musken, Frank Veltman, Henk Zeevat
  • Cum Laude committee: + Hans Kamp, François Récanati
• Summary: [ .pdf ] (10p.)
• Full-text: [ .pdf ] (383p.)
  • A screen readable 12pt pdf with hyperlinks
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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.

Keywords: attitudes, belief reports, de re/de se, acquaintance relations, context-dependence, indexicality, presupposition, LDRT