A New Hope
Kyle Blumberg, John Hawthorne
April 2021
 

The analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, i.e. sentences of the form 'S wants p'. In this paper, we turn attention from want reports to a closely related, but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, i.e. sentences of the form 'S hopes p'. We present two contrasts involving hope reports, and show that existing approaches to desire fail to explain these contrasts. We then develop a novel account that combines some of the central insights in the literature. We argue that our theory provides us with an elegant account of our contrasts, and yields a promising analysis of hoping.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006188
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: The Journal of Philosophy
keywords: desire ascriptions, logic of desire, semantics
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