One-World Semantics for Modals and Attitudes

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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.