November 17, 2017: Kristina Liefke

Time:: 4:30pm, November 17, 2017
Place:: Keio University, Mita Campus,
South Annex, 7th floor
Speaker:: Kristina Liefke (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich)
Title:: A perspectival semantics for 'de dicto'-attitude reports
Abstract:: This talk provides a compositional semantics for 'de dicto'-attitude reports that explains agent-specific differences in the substitutivity of co-intensional expressions in such reports. To obtain this explanation, the talk introduces a new, semantically rich, notion of content that integrates truth-conditional content (i.e. intensions) with attitude report content (i.e. agent-dependent hyperintensions). The context-dependence of semantic content then ensures the contextual variation of attitude report content. To carry this variation into the semantics of attitude reports, we assume that different occurrences of attitude verbs (on which these verbs take different subjects) supply different contexts to the content of the attitude complement. The resulting theory improves upon other attempts at capturing epistemic perspective-dependence (e.g. two-dimensional semantics) by providing a notion of attitude report content that is sufficiently formal and systematic to allow incorporation into a theory of compositional semantics, and that allows for an easy generalization to other aspects of epistemic perspective, e.g. the *time* of the reported attitude.

Semantics Research Group Meeting, November 17, 2017