Attitude ascriptions and speech reports were at the center of attention when philosophers and logicians began to see natural languages as formal systems. My chapter looks at the history of formal semantics, not for its own sake, but for lessons about how to approach attitude ascriptions and speech reports today. I think we may have taken a few wrong forks in the road. To solve the problem of logical equivalents, we should have listened to Rudolf Carnap, who made it clear that the fact that the truth of an attitude ascription or speech report may depend on the intensional structure of the embedded clause in no way forces the conclusion that propositions can’t be mere intensions. For de re ascriptions, we should have listened to David Kaplan, who replaced names in the scope of attitude verbs with descriptions, rather than associating the individuals those names stand for with modes of presentation. What held us back in both cases was Fregean compositionality. Shedding that legacy, I present prototypes for analyses of attitude verbs and verbs of speech within an intensional semantics where propositions are mere sets of possible worlds and de re ascriptions require no special technologies created just for them.

This chapter introducesattitude reports in possible worlds semantics, with attention to the motivation of such an approach and its main challenges, and the major revisions and alternatives that such challenges have prompted. We begin with a brief introduction to possible worlds semantics. We then sketch Jaakko Hintikka’s highly influential possible worlds-based approach to attitude reports and outline the key predictions that it makes. We discuss the problem of logical omniscience that Hintikka’s approach faces, and outline two competing approaches for solving it. We then turn to the more basic problem of logical equivalence that any approach to attitude reports in possible worlds semantics faces; we discuss several solution strategies thatgo under the name ‘hyperintensionality’ in that they proffer ways of modeling propositions that achieve a finer grain than do possible worlds. A recurring question in this discussion is: Which of our intuitions about inference patterns in attitude reports reflect semantic reasoning, and which reflect pragmatic or extra-linguistic reasoning? Finally, we explore two competing hypotheses regarding the compositional semantics of attitude reports.