Abstract

Past thinkers have distinguished between attitudes we have directly about objects and attitudes that are fully conceptual . Yet they fail to indicate how sentences we use to state attitudes relate to attitudes of one type or the other. ;I look at statements about propositional and attributary attitudes to discover when we state propositional, or de dicto, attitudes and when we state relational attributary, or de re, attitudes. Which type of attitude a speaker states depends on how he uses the singular terms appearing in his sentence. As Keith Donnellan has argued, we can use a singular term either referentially to pick out a particular object or attributively to pick out whatever the term fits. I hold that when the speaker uses a singular term referentially, he states a de re, attributary attitude. And when the speaker uses all his singular terms attributively, he states a de dicto, propositional attitude. ;After discovering when we state attitudes of either type, I apply this knowledge to interpreting sentences used to state attitudes. Interpreting sentences about attitudes involves explicitly formulating what the sentence says. To make attitude sentences explicit I use Bertrand Russell's theories of proper names and of definite descriptions. How the speaker uses the singular terms in his statement dictates which of Russell's theories we apply and how we apply it. ;Russell developed his theories of proper names and of descriptions with a particular semantics in mind. He thought that sentences denote propositions and predicates denote propositional functions. Note that I write 'denote' and not 'express'. Only in the context of this semantics do Russell's theories resolve quandaries about the logic of terms in sentences about attitudes. I present Russell's semantics and show how it resolves the opacity of such terms. ;Resolving these logical problems provides insight into what propositional and attributary attitudes are about. An attitude is about whatever the terms in the attitude content of a sentence expressing the attitude transparently denote.