A Perspectivalist Semantics for the Attitudes

Abstract

The semantical theory developed here makes truth a relation between sentences and theories, or belief systems. This contrasts with conventional realist semantical theories for which truth and falsity are relations between sentences and actual or possible worlds. Such semantic perspectivalism is hardly new. I Yet the prospects of the perspectivalist approach for interpreting propositional attitude constructions have been little explored. This essay develops one such possibility. In the framework proposed here, the theories or belief systems occupying one argument of the truth relation will have three crucially important features. First, each such theory will have an ontology, a set of objects that exist according to the theory. Second, although no object will ever grace the ontologies of two different theories, objects from distinct theories can be counterparts. The Venus of your theory can be a counterpart of the Venus of mine, even if we disagree about its mass. Third, objects will have an unconventional mereological structure: objects playing distinct theoretical roles in one theory will sometimes combine in another to form a third, composite object playing all the theoretical roles of the former objects, and containing them-or rather their counterparts-as subobjects. For instance, the Venus of modern astronomical theory will be composite, containing as subobjects counterparts of the Hesperus and Phosphorus of ancient astronomy. The perspectivalist semantics developed here aims to explain four categories of phenomena, exemplified by the behavior of sentences (1)-(12) below in four variations on a single example. (To establish important theoretical relationships among the four categories of phenomena, variations serve better than entirely distinct examples.) Case 1. Smith died of drowning. Detectives Arsky and Barsky jointly conclude that Smith was murdered by drowning, and that this explains his current condition. Neither detective has anyone in mind as a suspect, but Barsky thinks that Smith's