Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Attitude reports 141
have chosen to review Heim's proposal here is not that it happens to lack
competition. Rather, it is because in certain respects the theory is very similar
to the approach that I want to advocate, while on the other hand there are
non-trivial differences as well, and therefore bringing out what is common to
the two theories and what is not will give us a sharper view on both. Heim's
proposal is a version of what I have called the 'satisfaction theory' of
presupposition. In the foregoing chapters I have argued at length and ad
nauseam that the satisfaction theory is a non-starter, so there is ample reason
to reject the Heim's proposal right away. Nonetheless, I will try and judge her
account of attitude reports on its own merits.
Given that Heim is working within the framework of the satisfaction
theory, it is clear how she must proceed: she will have to devise definitions
that capture the truth-conditional meaning of the attitude verbs as well as
their projection characteristics. In her article Heim does this for the verbs
believe, want, wish, and be glad, but here we confine our attention to the
first two. Heim's analysis of believe is a transposition of the classical
possible-worlds semantics of belief sentences (Hintikka 1962, 1969).
According to the classical analysis, a sentence of the form 'a believes that