Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Attitude reports 157
(46b) involves two belief contexts, represented by (46b 2 ) and (46b 3 ) one of
which is embedded in the other. These two DRSs share a reference marker,
i.e. z, and therefore the values of z have to be counterparts. That is, the
correlate of z in somebody^ x's belief context must be a counterpart to the
correlate of z in someone/s 's belief context. Furthermore, since (46b l 1 ) and
(46b 2 ) share a reference marker, too, i.e. y, the correlate of y in somebody^'s x's
belief context will have to be a counterpart to the correlate of y in the
speaker's commitment slate, which is represented by (46b).
If this is a treatment of de re readings, my notion of de re construal is a
rather weak one. In the case of (46a), for example, the analysis I propose
merely says that there is some correlation between what the speaker is
committed to and what somebody^, somebodyx is claimed to believe. Many
philosophers would not want to call this a de re construal, because they
hold, for example, that one can only have de re beliefs about objects that
one has had intimate cognitive intercourse with. However, save for
terminological differences, my account is compatible with virtually any
theory of de re attitudes that I know of. For my current purposes, the
philosophical controversies over de re attitudes and attitude reports are
largely irrelevant, because my main concern is that there is sometimes a
correlation between the speaker's commitments and the beliefs he ascribes
to someone else; I am less interested in what exactly the nature of such
correlations may be, and therefore I will not take a very specific stance on
de re attitudes and attitude reports.
If we want to give a more precise characterization of the proposed
treatment of counterparts, it is helpful to first define a relation which is less
restrictive than the strict accessibility relation given in (37). This relation,
which I dub 'weak accessibility', holds whenever strict accessibility holds, but
in addition it holds across attitude contexts as well:
(47) Employment
Let T(a) T(oc) = {a}, if a E e RMi RM- u RM p ,' and T(P+