Attitudes and Changing Contexts [Hardcover]

In this book, the author defends a unified externalists account of propositional attitudes and reference, and formalizes this view within possible world semantics. He establishes a link between philosophical analyses of intentionality and reference, and formal semantic theories of discourse representation and context change. The relation between belief change and the semantic analyses of conditional sentences and evidential (knowledge) and buletic (desire) propositional attitudes is discussed extensively.

In this book, the author defends a unified externalists account of propositional attitudes and reference, and formalizes this view within possible world semantics. He establishes a link between philosophical analyses of intentionality and reference and formal semantic theories of discourse representation and context change. Stalnakerian diagonalization plays an important role here. Anaphora are treated as referential expressions, while presupposition is seen as a propositional attitude. The relation between belief change and the semantic analyses of conditional sentences and evidential (knowledge) and buletic (desire) propositional attitudes is discussed extensively.

Preface. 1 Content, belief and belief attributions. 1.1 Introduction. 1.2 Possible world semantics. 1.3 The description theory of reference. 1 .4 The description theory of reference and externalism. 1.5 The pragmatic account of intentionality. 1.6 Intentionality: the causal/informational account. 1.7 Combining the pragmatic and causal accounts. 1.8 Context dependence: two-dimensional semantics. 1.9 Solving problems by diagonalisation. 1.10 Self-locating beliefs. 1.10.1 The problem of self-locating beliefs. 1. 10.2 Fine grained possibilities. 1.10.3 Stalnakers solution. 1.11 Belief, and de dicto belief attributions. 1.11.1 Diagonalisation and aboutness. 1.11.2 Diagonalisation and partly linguistic beliefs. 1.11.3 Diagonalisation and proper names. 1.12 De re belief atlss