4 - Attitude Ascriptions

Summary

This chapter applies the treatments of world-binding and assignment-binding from Chapter 3 to several examples with attitude ascriptions. Semantically modal elements such as attitude verbs are treated as introducing quantification over assignments. The account captures phenomena with intensionality, shifted interpretations of world pronouns, and local/global readings of context-sensitive expressions via general mechanisms of movement and variable binding. Topics of discussion include quantification and assignment modification in the metalanguage, de re and de dicto readings, binding with pronouns vs. traces, and shifted interpretations of modals and proper names. A speculative predicativist analysis of names is developed; bare singular uses are analyzed as predicates with an implicit choice-function pronoun.