One-World Semantics for Modals and Attitudes

今年最重大的成就是在《语义学与语用学》杂志上发表了《信仰还是后果》一文。本文提出了一种新的分析信念归因句子的方法，该方法比文献中所有已知的替代方法都简单得多，而且在经验上优于所有已知的替代方法。这一改进的关键在于两点：将嵌入的子句确定为表示内部信仰的可推断结果，而不是直接表示内部信仰；分析解释本质上是主观的，而不是客观的。这些研究成果发表后，直接向欧洲六个主要机构的观众展示。此外，在情态分析和身份陈述方面的工作也取得了进展。对于我们未来的计划，最重要的是，我们已经将同一性陈述确定为我们将考察的经验核心，以探索其他态度归因和情态陈述的语义。“信念或后果”的解释框架是专门设计的，旨在将解释与话语参与者的信念联系起来，因此很容易处理认知情态语境中的同一性陈述，这对其他方法是有挑战的。出于同样的原因，它也可以很容易地扩展到其他态度语境中的同一性陈述。然而，在形而上学的情态语境中，它面临着同样的同一性陈述的挑战。应对这些挑战是来年的中心任务。

The most significant achievement this year was the publication of "Belief or Consequences" in the journal "Semantics and Pragmatics". This paper presented a novel way of analyzing belief attribution sentences that is vastly simpler than and empirically superior to all known alternatives in the literature. Two insights were key to the improvement: identifying the embedded clause as denoting an inferable consequence of an internal belief rather than directly denoting an internal belief, and analyzing interpretation as essentially subjective rather than objective. After publication, these research results were presented directly to audiences at six major institutions in Europe.Work has additionally progressed on the analysis of modality and of identity statements. Most importantly for our future plans, we have identified identity statements as the empirical core we will look at to probe the semantics of other attitude attributions and of modal statements. The interpretive framework from "Belief or Consequences" is specifically designed to relate interpretation to the beliefs of the discourse participants and so easily handles identity statements in epistemic modal contexts, something that is challenging to other approaches. For this same reason, it is also readily extendable to identity statements in other attitude contexts. However, it faces challenges with those same identity statements in metaphysical modal contexts. Working out responses to these challenges is the central task for the upcoming year.