Fine-grained semantics for attitude reports

Harvey Lederman, Princeton

Abstract

I observe that the "concept-generator" theory of Percus and Sauerland [2003], Anand [2006], Charlow and Sharvit [2014] cannot deliver an intuitive true interpretation of simple sentences like "Plato did not know that Hesperus was Phosphorus". In response, I develop a new theory of attitude reports, which employs a fine-grained semantics for names, according to which the semantic value of a name is not the individual the name names. I show how to extend this theory to handle generalized quantifiers, and then present three examples showing that proponents of fine-grained theories, too, should adopt key aspects of the concept-generator theory. These examples are of interest independently of my fine-grained semantics for names, since two of them constrain the concept-generator theory itself more tightly than previously discussed examples had.