De re attitude reports about disjunctive attitudes

Abstract

This paper discusses the semantics of so-called de re propositional attitudes. According to the standard Kaplanian analysis, the semantics of such dicta contains existential quantifica­tion over functions that map the attitude holder and the object of their de re attitude to an individual concept by which the attitude holder identifies the object. This existential quantifi­cation has a wider scope than the universal quantification over possible worlds that is general­ly associated with the semantics of attitude dicta. We explore examples of disjunctive de re attitudes and show that these dicta have truth conditions that cannot be grasped by the stand­ard analysis. To account for them, we propose a revision of the theory of concept generators and show how the revised theory makes correct predictions.