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Proposes a picture of attitude ascriptions, which relies on the notion of quasi-indicators. The main idea defended is that in an attitude ascription we relate the attributee to a proposition and a sentence. The latter is the sentence the reporter uses to classify the attributee’s mental state. This classification can be more or less accurate and often it can only be partial.

This chapter focuses on how we show what's within in ways not typical of our species. A person's idiosyncratic display of an emotion, for instance, might nevertheless make that emotion perceptible if that display is a characteristic component thereof. Such behavior can later become conventionalized, and it is argued that this is one major route into the conventionalization of expression. Conventions also make language possible, and it is argued that natural language is used to indicate the content, and sometimes also the modality, of the states we express. In the process of this argument, an analogy between attitude ascription and measurement (such as has been suggested by D. Davidson, H. Field, R. Matthews, R. Stalnaker, and others) is explored. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some devices of natural language that have a distinctively expressive role, so-called illocutionary force indicators.

This chapter argues against orthodox views, according to which propositional attitudes are relations to propositions, propositions which must be expressed in true ascriptions of these attitudes. In place, we offer a positive theory about how thoughts are ascribed, on somewhat Davidsonian lines.

This chapter offers a systematic assessment of Kit Fine’s Semantic Relationism (2007), in which he presents a “relational” version of Millianism (about names and related expressions). It compares this version of Millianism with the standard nonrelational version. It focuses on their different responses to two aspects of Frege’s puzzle—one involving the cognitive, assertive, and conversational contents of uses of nonhyperintensional sentences; the other involving the propositions expressed by attitude ascriptions. Regarding the first aspect of the puzzle, the chapter argues that the two versions of Millianism give comparable and largely correct results. Regarding the second, it shows that relational Millianism faces counterexamples that are easily handled by nonrelational Millianism, when both are combined with a reasonable semantics for attitude verbs.

Mental files serve to think about objects in the world, but they have a derived, metarepresentational function: they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. An ‘indexed file’ is a file that stands, in the subject's mind, for another subject's file about an object. In light of the distinction between indexed files and regular files, the possible interpretations of an attitude report of the form ‘x believes that a is F’ are investigated, and several notions of ‘opacity’ distinguished.

This chapter extends the Discourse Contextualist account from Chapter 3 to capture various embedding phenomena with epistemic modals. The behavior of epistemic modals in several types of attitude ascriptions, suppositional contexts, and inferences are investigated. It is argued that with epistemic modals, unlike with paradigm context-sensitive expressions, there is a pragmatically derivable preference for local accommodation readings in certain embedded contexts. This interpretive preference helps explain embedding data that have seemed problematic for contextualists. Advantages over alternative relativist semantics are considered. The chapter concludes by revisiting the challenge of explaining apparent contrasts between epistemic modals and paradigm context-sensitive expressions in light of the developments of Discourse Contextualism thus far. Discourse Contextualism sheds light on general issues concerning the varieties of context-sensitive language, the nature of presupposition and its role in communication, the interactions between context and content throughout interpretation, and the relations among semantics, pragmatics, and metasemantics.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the volume, summarizes the chapters in it, and looks at the various arguments that have been raised for semantic relativism over the past decade. It concludes that two of these arguments seem to be resistant to the anti-relativist replies that have appeared in response to this work on relativism. One of these is an argument from agreement. It is argued that contextualist theories about various puzzling locutions have a hard time explaining why it is so easy for people who would happily utter the same words to describe themselves as agreeing, if those words were really context-sensitive. Another is an argument concerning attitude ascriptions. It seems there are quite different restrictions on what values the (allegedly) context-sensitive expressions can take inside and outside of attitude ascriptions. Since this isn't how context-sensitive terms usually behave, this phenomena tells against contextualism, and in favour of relativism.

This chapter argues that a Fregean theory that individuates propositions finely by their conclusive rational relations faces no objections from social anti-individualism, communicative exchange, or the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions. Social anti-individualism says that a subject's mental contents are partly determined by the linguistic community. So long as rational abilities are also partly determined socially, a subject's mental contents can be partly determined socially even if propositions are individuated by rational relations. Individuating propositions finely may appear to cause problems for communicative exchange and propositional attitude ascriptions; it may appear to increase the difficulties of coordinating contents said or ascribed with contents heard or thought. However, it is shown that a theory that individuates propositions more finely has all of the resources of a theory that individuates propositions more coarsely; hence, the former cannot be at a disadvantage to the latter.

Objections to the account of propositional attitudes and their ascription in Chapters 5 and 6 are discussed. At issue in the objections are the nature of general principles governing the interpretation of contextually sensitive expressions, as well as issues about ‘the number of contexts’ in which utterances occur. An account of these principles and of the ways in which contexts are ‘resolved’ in interpretation is developed.

Mental files, in this chapter’s framework, function as ‘singular terms in the language of thought’; they serve to think about objects in the world (and to store information about them). But they have a derived, meta-representational function: they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. To account for the meta-representational use of files, the chapter introduces the notion of an ‘indexed file’, that is a vicarious file that stands, in the subject’s mind, for another subject’s file about an object. Using that notion, it argues, one can provide an analysis of attitude ascriptions and the conniving use of empty singular terms.

This chapter intends to offer a theory of empty names that is consistent with the doctrine of direct reference and respects the intuition that sentences such as Vulcan does not exist, Le Verrier imagined Vulcan, and Le Verrier believed that Vulcan orbited between Mercury and the sun, express propositions to which the name Vulcan makes its contribution and which are either true or false. The theory has recourse to a notion of structured propositions that are quite unlike singular propositions, but it still assumes that all proper names, empty or otherwise, have no descriptive content that is semantically relevant. The new-style propositions are language-bound. Thus, the theory reminds us of sententialism–i.e. the theory that the proper objects of propositional attitudes are sentences–but is not vulnerable to the same objections. It is argued that the new-style propositions fare better than the gappy ones in accounting for the semantics of empty names and, more generally, of attitude ascriptions.

This chapter addresses a less-commonly discussed substitution failure in attitude ascriptions: a “that”-clause and its corresponding proposition description cannot in general be interchanged in the scope of psych-verbs, despite the standard view that the two forms refer to the same proposition. For example, “Holmes suspects that Moriarty has returned” and “Holmes suspects the proposition that Moriarty has returned” mean something quite different. The chapter accounts for these data in the framework of neo-Davidsonian semantics, arguing that substitution does not simply change the syntactic category of the attitude verb from clausal to transitive or vice versa, but also triggers the side-effect of changing thematic relations: when the transitive verb is used, it is the theme of the attitude-state or event that is identified, but when the clausal verb is used, it is the content of the state that is identified.

This chapter addresses the assumed connection between de se attitude ascription and logophoricity in the case of Chinese ziji. It is widely believed that logophors are among the paradigm cases of de se marking, and that long-distance ziji is logophoric. Drawing on a critical examination of a variety of analyses, this chapter argues that long-distance anaphora, de se interpretation, and logophoric marking are overlapping but distinct phenomena. Even if ziji is logophoric, it does not automatically trigger de se requirement. A de se-neutral analysis of ziji is consistent with pragmatic derivations of interpretations that emphasize the self. The findings point to a new approach to long-distance binding, and identify the blocking effect as the key issue for further research.

This chapter develops a contextualist account of normative language, focusing on broadly normative readings of modal verbs. The account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the discourse properties of normative language from a contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with principles of interpretation and conversation. In using normative language, interlocutors can exploit their grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to manage an evolving system of norms. Discourse Contextualism provides a perspicuous framework for further philosophical theorizing about the nature of normativity, normative language, and normative judgment. Delineating these issues can help refine our understanding of the space of overall theories and motivate more fruitful ways the dialectics may proceed. Discourse Contextualism provides a linguistic basis for a more comprehensive theory of normativity and normative discourse and practice.

This chapter motivates and develops what can be called a condition semantics for moral terms. An important function of language is to distinguish among ways the world might be. But sentences can also distinguish among ways things might be more broadly. According to condition semantics, moral sentences conventionally distinguish among moral standards (or test whether a moral standard meets a certain condition) just as ordinary factual sentences conventionally distinguish among possible worlds (or test whether a possible world meets a certain condition). This point is captured formally within an extension of a familiar truth-conditional paradigm. The resulting analysis improves upon its main competitors: invariantism and contextualism. The framework of condition semantics also offers a perspicuous way of posing various classical metaethical questions—e.g. concerning relativism, expressivism, and judgement internalism. This can motivate clearer, better motivated answers and suggest new ways the dialectic may proceed.

The subject of Lecture IV is attributions of attitude. In it, Davidson extends his theory of indirect quotation, which had appeared in 1968, to propositional attitude ascriptions more generally. He begins by criticizing rival accounts due to Quine, Scheffler, Church, and Frege. His positive proposal turns on the idea that the complementizer clauses embedded in ascriptions of attitude are not semantically a part of the embedding sentence. According to the paratactic account he favors, attributions of attitude involve demonstrative reference to an utterance of the speaker’s, which is claimed to stand in some relation to some utterance or attitude of the ascribee.

Accounting for coreference de jure in terms of identity of file entails that coreference de jure is a transitive relation. But there are counterexamples to the claim that coreference de jure is transitive (Soames, Pinillos). Building on the previous chapter, this chapter shows that strong coreference de jure is transitive while weak coreference de jure isn’t. Whenever fusion or fission of files occurs, transitivity fails. More generally, transitivity fails at the dynamic level: dynamic files only exhibit weak coreference de jure. Fusion and fission of files, hence transitivity failures, also occur in metarepresentational deployment of ‘indexed files’. But transitivity can always be restored by fixing the point of view (strong coreference de jure), and it is strong coreference de jure which primarily matters in utterance interpretation.