Reports of what we say, know, or believe. Précis of 2022 John Locke Lectures
Angelika Kratzer
March 2023 

Attitude ascriptions and speech reports are a litmus test for any semantic theory. They were at the center of discussion when philosophers and logicians became interested in natural language and began to develop the semantic frameworks we are relying on today. Mastery of attitude ascriptions and speech reports is a milestone in the cognitive development of a child and the human species as a whole. Attitude and speech reports are built from smaller building blocks that combine and recombine to produce the interpretations those reports have. My lectures were a search for those building blocks and for clues about how they might interact with each other. The goal – like that of any semantic theory – was a typology where the combinatorics of building blocks generates the range of possible interpretations of the constructions we are trying to understand. Oxford Philosophy Magazine doesn't allow formal bibliographies, so I had to fold all credits into the text, as is common in non-academic publications. I also made a few other changes with respect to the first version, making the précis more widely accessible.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007148 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Oxford Philosophy Magazine
keywords:	attitude ascriptions, speech reports, knowledge ascriptions, belief ascriptions
previous versions:	v1 [February 2023]
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