Full Description
This book is about beliefs, language, communication and cognition. It deals with the fundamental issue of the interpretation of the speaker's utterance expressing a belief and reporting on beliefs of other people in the form of oratio obliqua. The main aim of the book is to present a new account of the problem of interpreting utterances expressing beliefs and belief reports in terms of an approach called Default Semantics.
Contents
Chapter headings and selected sub-headings:
Preface
Introduction
Semantic Ambiguities and Semantic Underspecification
Ambiguous discourse? Highlights from ambiguity debates
What is said
Towards delimiting implicatures
Semantic Defaults
Intentions in communication
The primary intention principle and definite descriptions
The principle of the parsimony of levels
Other applications
Defaults in dynamic semantics
Intentionality and Propositional Attitudes
'Directedness' of acts of consciousness: the phenomenological tradition
Intentional relation and defaults
Intentions and intentionality
Are intentions in the head?
Intentionality and ambiguity: concluding remarks
The Default De Re Principle
Propositional attitudes: a close-up
Whose meaning?
On sense and mode of presentation
De Re, De Dicto, and De Dicto Proper
Red giants and white dwarfs: context-dependence of attitude ascription
Default De Re
Lexicon and the Power of Referring
Redefining referring expressions
Proper names and modes of presentation
Referring by indexicals
Referent accessibility and the strength of referring
Vehicles of Thought in Attitude Ascription
Thoughts and acts of thought
Vehicles of thought
Vehicles and attitudes
The core of meaning
Discourse Representation Theory and Propositional Attitudes
Semantics and pragmatics revisited
Context
Belief expressions and belief reports in DRT
DRT and intentions
Belief Reports in a Contrastive Perspective
Belief, culture, and translation
Contrastive semantics and pragmatics
Context and markedness
Complemetizer that in contrast
Denouement: Double Occam's Razor
The semantics of common sense
Beyond propositional attitudes
Final remarks
Bibliography
Index
