Factivity, Belief and Discourse⇤

A variety of attitude predicates seem to presuppose that their complement is true, including the cognitive factives (know, discover, realize), which presuppose their propositional complement p, and emotive factives (love, regret, sad), which presuppose both p and the attitude holder’s belief in p. It will be shown that, in sharp contrast, no predicate in English that reports a communicative act (e.g., claim, say; argue, explain) is factive. What underlies this systematic gap? Why do we find attitude predicates that express true beliefs, but not true utterances? We will propose that the answer to this question follows from a systematic grammatical distinction between predicates that report the mental states and those that report discourse moves of conversational agents, coupled with the pragmatic calculation of main point.