Belief Reports and the Property Theory of Content

The property theory of content is a view about the metaphysics of mental content, which is motivated chiefly by standard examples of de se attitudes. According to the property theory, the contents of beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are not propositions. Instead they are properties, that is, entities without truth values that are constant across persons and other objects, plac-es, and times (although properties can be said to be true of persons and oth-er objects). In this essay, I develop an account of truth conditions for cogni-tive attitude reports – belief reports in particular – which appeals to the property theory of content. The theory of belief and the theory of belief reports are different things, but it seems clear that facts about what we be-lieve must be what make our true belief reports true. Along the way I con-sider some competing semantic accounts that appeal to the doctrine of propositions, that is, the view that belief contents are propositions, con-ceived somewhat neutrally as entities with possible-worlds truth conditions. This essay is divided into four sections. The first has to do with the proper-ty theory of content and reports of de se belief, the second with belief re-ports in which that-clauses contain proper names or natural kind terms, and the third with what we might roughly describe as reports of purely de dicto belief. The result of the first three sections will be a few apparently dispar-ate accounts of truth conditions for belief reports, offered without any claim to comprehensiveness. The fourth section contains some ideas about unify-ing the accounts offered in the first three sections, as well as a discussion of the logical form of belief reports and the sort of proposition they express