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 introduces the theoretical context for the compositional semantic framework to be developed in the book. A key innovation is to posit explicit representations of context – formally, variables for assignment functions – in the syntax and semantics of natural language. A primary focus is on a spectrum of linguistic shifting phenomena, in which the context relevant for interpretation depends on features of the linguistic environment. The proposed theory affords a standardization of quantification across domains, and an improved framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. Comparisons with alternative operator-based theories are briefly considered. An outline of the subsequent chapters is presented.

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.