Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Attitude reports 169
there is a boy scout such that Wilma believes that he is in love with her, and
that Wilma, too, believes that the individual in question is a boy scout. For if
(66) may be read this way, it obviously isn't sufficient if we can explain how
the indefinite in (66) can be construed de reo re. What we need, in addition, is an
account of the fact that it can be read de dicta dicto at the same time, i.e. we require
some form of importation.
It is evident that importation isn't anything like a logical rule of inference:
it doesn't always apply. What is more, I see no good reason to assume that it
is default rule, either.
(67) a. My mother thOUght} thought | .. ,
> that my sIster sister was drunk. drunk,
b. The policeman thought
J
We would normally infer from (67a) that the speaker's mother believed of
the speaker's sister that she is his sister. (67b), in contrast, would not normally
license the inference that the policeman had this belief. If importation were
a default rule, the former would be the 'normal' case, and the latter would be
an exception. But this is counterintuitive. I conclude, therefore, that
importation is neither a logical nor a default rule: it is just a convenient label
for a certain class of context-dependent plausibility inferences.
If this conclusion is correct, then it is further evidence against Heim's
theory of belief reports. On Heim's analysis, a sentence of the form 'a
believes that