Between De Dicto and De Re: De Objecto Attitudes

International audienceHintikka's second generation epistemic logic introduces a syntactic device allowing to express independence relations between certain logical constants. De re knowledge attributions can be reformulated in terms of quantifier independence. However, the reformulation does not extend to non-factive attitudes like belief. There, formulas with independent quantifiers serve to express a new type of attitude, intermediate between de dicto and de re, to be dubbed as attitudes de objecto: in each possible world compatible with the agent's belief, there is an individual with the specified property - the same individual in each world (contrast with de dicto), while the individual need not exist actually (unlike with de re). We discuss the philosophical benefits of our analysis of propositional attitudes. We propose a refined account of the behaviour of proper names as well as of indefinite and definite descriptions in attitude reports. Some remarks about perception and the hallucination argument are also presented