The pragmatics of transparent belief reports
Analysis 70 (3):438-446 (2010)
| Abstract |
(Note: this is now a working pdf of the final version, March 2010) It is uncontroversial that psychological verbs like ‘believe’, ‘think’, or ‘suspect’ have first person present tense uses that are transparent in the sense that they convey information about the world rather than about the speaker’s psychological states, as in ‘I believe it’s about to rain’. One explanation for these transparent belief reports or avowals, mainly coming from the Wittgensteinian tradition, is that the verbs in question are systematically ambiguous, or that they have an expressive rather than descriptive function in the first-personal case. I maintain, in contrast, that there is no asymmetry between transparent and other uses of psychological verbs at the level of literal meaning. Instead, belief reports convey information about the world in virtue of standard Gricean conversational principles, which also serve to predict when they fail to be transparent. Thus, semantic continuity is maintained and the anomalous behaviour of the verbs explained by a simple pragmatic story. |
|||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
  |
| External links |
|
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesEmar Maier (2005). De Re and de Se in Quantified Belief Reports. In Sylvia Blaho, Luis Vicente & Erik Schoorlemmer (eds.), Proceedings of Console Xiii.
Declan Smithies (2012). Mentalism and Epistemic Transparency. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (4):723-741.
Gary Ostertag (2005). A Puzzle About Disbelief. Journal of Philosophy 102 (11):573-93.
Takashi Yagisawa (1997). Salmon Trapping. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (2):351-370.
Amy Kind (2003). What's so Transparent About Transparency? Philosophical Studies 115 (3):225-244.
Kent Bach (1997). Do Belief Reports Report Beliefs? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (3):215-241.
Emar Maier (2006). Belief in Context: Towards a Unified Semantics of De Re and De Se Attitude Reports. Dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen
Kent Bach (2000). A Puzzle About Belief Reports. In K. Jaszczolt (ed.), The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports. Elsevier.
Charles Sayward (2007). Quine and His Critics on Truth-Functionality and Extensionality. Logic and Logical Philosophy 16:45-63.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-10-06Total downloads86 ( #8,470 of 549,087 )Recent downloads (6 months)17 ( #3,604 of 549,087 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
