Traditionally, ‘that’-clauses occurring in attitude attributions are taken to denote the objects of the attitudes. Prior raised a famous problem: even if Frege fears that the Begriffsschrift leads to a paradox, it is unlikely that he fears a proposition, a sentence or what have you as the alleged object denoted by the ‘that’-clause. The usual way out is to say that ‘that’-clauses do not contribute the objects of the attitudes but their contents. I will show that, if we accept this (...) answer, either we’d better stop working on attitude attributions or we’d better work harder on them. (shrink)

Donald davidson has proposed an account of indirect discourse that has been the subject of a great deal of discussion. Critics have contended that the theory saddles sentences in indirect discourse with implications they do not have, That the theory rests on an unsuitably obscure primitive notion that it cannot be extended to "de re" constructions and that it cannot be extended to sentences about other propositional attitudes such as belief. In this paper, I formulate davidson's theory more precisely than (...) it has been formulated, Thus far, And defend the theory from all the criticisms just described. (shrink)

One commonly stated reason for thinking that there are abstract entities such as propositions is that they are needed to account for undeniable facts about propositional attitudes and the sentences reporting such attitudes. According to the propositional theory, belief, doubt, assertion and other attitudes are relations between individuals and propositions. In sentences reporting these relations the words in the content-sentence refer to concepts or other abstract things and the entire ‘that-clause’ refers to a proposition. According to a common rival account, (...) propositional attitudes are complex relations between individuals and sentences and each that-clause refers to the content-sentence it contains. The words in the content-sentence either fail to refer or refer to themselves. A striking implication of both the propositional theory and the sentential theory is that the words and phrases in the content-sentence of a sentence expressing a propositional attitude fail to refer to the familiar things to which they ordinarily refer. (shrink)

A semantic theory T for a language L should assign content to utterances of sentences of L. One common assumption is that T will assign p to some S of L just in case in uttering S a speaker A says that p. We will argue that this assumption is mistaken.

In this chapter I deal with indirect reports in terms of language games. I try to make connections between the theory of language games and the theory of indirect reports, in the light of the issue of clues and cues. Indirect reports are based on an interplay of voices. The voice of the reporter must allow hearers to ‘reconstruct’ the voice of the reported speaker. Ideally, it must be possible to separate the reporter’s voice from that of the reported speaker. (...) When we analyze the language game of indirect reporting, we ideally want to establish which parts belong to the primary voice and which parts belong to the reporter’s voice. In this paper I apply considerations on language games by Dascal et al. and I explore the dialectics between abstract pragmatics principles and considerations about situated uses that are sensitive to cues and clues. (shrink)