Gothenburg Monographs in Linguistics 13 on the Semantics of Propositional Attitude Reports

This is a study on the truth-conditional semantics of propositional attitude attribution statements. It is suggested that attitude contents should be characterized in terms of abstract concepts, which are connected by way of a number of basic logical relations derived from a version of Quinean predicate-functor logic. This allows us to handle all logical relationships definable by first-order predicate calculus in a way that does not exploit variable-like entities. Individual, predicate, and propositional concepts are recognized. These concepts provide the relata of various mental attitude relations and may denote (or may fail to denote) other kinds of object. The resulting framework is itself formalized in first-order predicate calculus. This proposal is intended to give an account that is to a high degree independent of any particular view of the metaphysical, psychological or epistemological status of propositional attitude reports. An overview of different kinds of propositional and other conceptual attitude report constructions in English is given and it is suggested how the framework proposed can be applied to them.