The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication October 2011 Volume 6: Formal Semantics and Pragmatics: Discourse, Context, and Models pages 1-30 DOI: 10.4148/biyclc.v6i0.1572

ABSTRACT: Ascriptions of belief and other doxastic proposi-tional attitudes are commonly interpreted as quantifying over a set of possible worlds constituting doxastic alternatives for the belief experiencer. Katz (2000, 2003, 2008) has argued that be-lief predicates and other stative attitude predicates, along with stative predicates generally, lack a Davidsonian event argument and therefore do not report on any eventuality (event or state). Hacquard (2010), in contrast, assumes that all attitude ascrip-tions describe an event corresponding to the mental state of the attitude experiencer. The present investigation suggests that the strengths of doxastic predicates can be modeled by gener-alized quantifiers over the doxastic alternative set, permitting us to formulate and test predictions based on standard interac-tions of these quantifiers with negation when these ascriptions are negated. This provides a middle ground between Katz and Hac-quard, whereby some belief ascriptions are interpreted as nothing more than a quantified condition over a doxastic alternative set, while others attribute a Davidsonian belief state to the experi-encer. In the latter case, the condition involving quantification over doxastic alternatives is an essential content condition which serves to individuate the eventuality described by the belief re-port, and to identify it across possible worlds. Two Types of Belief Report