One-World Semantics for Modals and Attitudes

今年最重要的成就是在《语义学与语用学》杂志上发表了《信念还是结果》。本文提出了一种分析信念归因句子的新方法，它比文献中所有已知的替代方法简单得多，而且在经验上优于其他方法。有两点见解是改进的关键：确定嵌入的条款表示内部信念的可推断结果，而不是直接表示内部信念，并分析解释本质上是主观的，而不是客观的。出版后，这些研究成果直接呈现给欧洲六个主要机构的听众。情态和同一性陈述的分析工作也取得了进展。对于我们未来的计划最重要的是，我们已经确定了身份陈述作为经验核心，我们将探讨其他态度归因和情态陈述的语义。“信念或结果”的解释框架是专门设计来将解释与话语参与者的信念联系起来的，因此很容易处理认知模态上下文中的身份陈述，这对其他方法来说是一个挑战。出于同样的原因，它也很容易扩展到其他态度上下文中的身份陈述。然而，在形而上学的模态语境中，它面临着同样的同一性陈述的挑战。制定应对这些挑战的办法是即将到来的一年的中心任务。

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.