Fodor’s puzzle and the semantics of attitude reports

Fodor (1970) came up with the following puzzle: in a context where Adrian has decided what kind of jacket to buy but has no idea that the kind of jacket he wants is just like Malte’s jacket, there is a reading of Adrian wants to buy a jacket like Malte’s which neither the de re nor the de dicto reading render correctly. Based on a review of approaches to Fodor’s puzzle in the literature I argue that none of the proposals in the literature provides a general account of Fodor’s puzzle by providing counterexamples to Kaufmann’s de qualitate approach (Schwager (2009)). Based on a detailed reconstruction of Fodor’s puzzle in an extension of Discourse Representation Theory to the representation of attitudes I raise doubts whether such a general solution exists. Instead, I argue that Fodor’s puzzle points to limitations in current logical form formalisms for the semantic analysis of attitude reports and propose to approach Fodor’s puzzle in a purpose-based account of attitude reports.