I present a challenge for the traditional view of belief as a two-place relation we bear to propositions. The central observation is that it makes sense to say (for example) that what Peter believes about Paris is what Lewis believes about London, despite no proposition being coherently identifiable as what each person believes about his respective city. Exceptional cases like this, I argue, demonstrate that sometimes we need something akin to a property to play the role originally assigned to a proposition. When I utter, ‘Peter believes about Paris that it’s pretty,’ for example, the ‘that’-clause must designate the property of being pretty; unlike any proposition, this property is the kind of thing that, roughly speaking, different people can believe about different cities. I end this work by showing how to salvage the traditional, binary view of belief through a complex lexical meaning for the word ‘about.’
I develop a compositional semantics for structured propositions that incorporates possible world variables at logical form in order to correctly predict challenging cases of transparency. This work contributes to a growing literature aimed at legitimizing structured views of propositions by implementing them in accordance with contemporary theories of formal semantics.
Considers other explanations for the data in my MIND (2021).
Considers a ternary view of belief.
Chair: Josh Dever
Committee: Hans Kamp, Ray Buchanan, Harvey Lederman, Jeff Speaks
My dissertation concerns the semantics of propositional attitude reports and the metaphysical nature of truth-evaluable content. It begins with novel linguistic data that challenge the standard view of the attitudes, such as belief, as two-place relations we bear to propositions. These data suggest that certain `that'-clauses designate properties, such as being pretty, that are not propositions; a formal semantic account demonstrates the complexity required in order to salvage the standard view. In light of this result, I propose a simpler account of the data according to which belief is a three-place relation we bear to things and properties, where propositional belief is understood as a relation we bear to possible worlds and their properties. The view is formally implemented within an intensional semantic framework that allows advocates of structured propositions to account for key features of linguistic intensionality.