Propositional Attitude Reports
Peter Hanks · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
Types are abundant. Any type is situated in a virtually limitless range of more or less finely grained types. This chapter exploits the flexibility afforded by this abundance to give an account of propositional attitude reports. Roughly stated, the idea is that when a speaker utters a that-clause in a propositional attitude report she performs a token of a type, a proposition, which sits in the middle of a range of related types. The report is true in a context depending on whether the subject of the report bears the relevant attitude to one of the types in this range. This will allow us to capture, in a fairly simple and straightforward way, the complex and highly context-sensitive facts about the truth conditions of attitude reports.