The paper develops a proof-theoretic semantics for belief reports by extending the constructive type-theoretical formalism presented in Więckowski with a specific kind of set-forming operator suited for the representation of belief attitudes. The extended formalism allows us to interpret constructions which involve, e.g., iteration of belief, quantifying into belief contexts, and anaphora in belief reports. Moreover, constructive solutions to canonical instances of the problem of hyperintensionality are suggested. The paper includes a discussion of Ranta’s constructive account of belief (...) reports. (shrink)

128 female Ss were asked to make 4 judgments about a young woman after reading her "job application portfolio." Five characteristics of the young woman were manipulated orthogonally. Ss were asked to report how each of the 5 manipulated factors had influenced each of their judgments. "Observer Ss," who had access only to very impoverished descriptions of each of the 5 factors, were asked to predict how each of the factors would influence each of the judgments. Results show that S (...) reports about the effects of the factors on the judgments were in general highly inaccurate; observer predictions were extremely similar to S reports; for the single judgment for which Ss showed substantial accuracy, observer predictions were as accurate as S reports. Results indicate that whatever introspective access to cognitive processes may exist, it is not sufficient to produce generally accurate reports about such processes, nor even to produce reports that differ much from those of poorly informed outside observers. (shrink)

Annual Reports on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) issued by Health CanadaCanada on behalf of the Government of Canada strive to make essential information public, on this large national program that over five years has provided death to over 30,000 Canadians. The source of the information is self-reporting by physicians and nurse practitioners who offer to act as MAID assessors and providers, as well as self-reporting by cooperating pharmacists. Focus of this discussion is the latest available document in this (...) series, the Third Annual Report on MAID published in July 2022 and providing data on 10,064 deaths by MAID in 2021. In addition to reviewing essential information about MAID recipients and MAID providers, the discussion is centered on the method of data collection, the rapid and unexpected annual increase of cases, the underlying medical conditions, the nature of suffering reported by MAID applicants, the use of palliative care, the decision-making about one’s eligibility, the role of the reflection period, necessary requirement to obtain informed consent and the denial of assisted dying. In each case, the attention is drawn to missing or indeterminate elements, and essential but unavailable analysis of data, in order to identify further information that ought to be collected and used to generate future annual reports and to refine the delivery of MAID program and its oversight. (shrink)

What is it reasonable to believe about our most successful scientific theories such as the general theory of relativity or quantum mechanics? That they are true, or at any rate approximately true? Or only that they successfully ‘save the phenomena’, by being ‘empirically adequate’? In earlier work I explored the attractions of a view called Structural Scientific Realism (hereafter: SSR). This holds that it is reasonable to believe that our successful theories are (approximately) structurally correct (and also that this is (...) the strongest epistemic claim about them that it is reasonable to make). In the first part of this paper I shall explain in some detail what this thesis means and outline the reasons why it seems attractive. The second section outlines a number of criticisms that have none the less been brought against SSR in the recent (and as we shall see, in some cases, not so recent) literature; and the third and final section argues that, despite the fact that these criticisms might seem initially deeply troubling (or worse), the position remains viable. (shrink)

In a novel move against Russellianism, Heck (2014) has argued that reports of the form S believes that p are semantically opaque on the grounds that there are no other means in English to report psychologically individuated beliefs, such as those Lois Lane reports using the names ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent.’ I show that there are several other ways to meet this need. I focus on quotational reports of the form S believes “p,” which philosophers have overlooked (...) or mischaracterized. I argue that reports of this form are no more metalinguistic than those using the complementizer that. In both, the meaning of the report depends on the meaning, not the form, of the complement. Some distinguishing features of non-metalinguistic quotational reports are that their complements force “deictic shift” and have no transparent interpretation. Free direct speech and thought bubbles have the same properties. The “q-ascriptions” McCullagh (2017a) proposed to defend Russellianism against Heck are not in common use and on his account are unsuitably metalinguistic. The fact that quotational belief reports are opaque without being metalinguistic makes the Russellian thesis that the meaning of a name is its referent untenable, thereby undermining Russellianism about belief reports. (shrink)

Can supervaluationism successfully handle indirect speech reports? This chapter considers, and rejects, Schiffer’s claim that they cannot. One alleged problem with indirect speech reports is that the truth of “Carla said that Bob is tall” implausibly requires that Carla said all of a huge number of precise things (i.e. that Bob was over n feet tall, for values of n corresponding to precisifications of “tall”). The paper shows why the supervaluationist is not committed to this. Vague singular terms (...) are no particular problem for supervaluationism within indirect speech reports, it is argued, but there remain some issues surrounding certain vague demonstratives. The supervaluationist has good responses available, however, and any remaining questions face all theories of vagueness and are more appropriately addressed within a theory of demonstratives rather than a theory of vagueness. (shrink)

I call 'empathetic attitude reports' attitude reports such as 'I believe you that you will come back' and 'I understand you that you are not in the mood'. I will argue that such attitude reports cannot be analysed in terms of two-place attitudinal relations but involve an essential interpersonal relation of trust or understanding.

The aim of this paper is to pose a problem for theories that claim that belief reports are context dependent. Firstly, I argue that the claim is committed to verbalism, a theory that derives the context sensitivity of belief reports from the context sensitivity of the psychological verbs used in such reports. Secondly, I argue that verbalism is not an attractive theoretical option because it is in conflict with the non-proto-rigidity of verbs like ‘believe’. Finally, I describe (...) various consequences that the argument has for invariantism and moderate contextualism. (shrink)

Contraceptive prevalence is a key variable estimated from Demographic and Health Surveys. But the prevalence estimated from reports of husbands differs widely from that estimated for wives. In this research, using data from six Demographic and Health Surveys of sub-Saharan Africa, reports from spouses in monogamous couples with no other reported sex partners in the recent period are examined. Agreement ranged from 47% to 82%, but among couples in which one or both reported use, the category represented less (...) than half in all nations except Zimbabwe. Husbands generally had higher reports of condoms, periodic abstinence and pills but fewer reports of the IUD, injections and female sterilization. Either discussion of family planning with the spouse and/or higher socioeconomic status was associated with agreement in most of the surveys. Ambiguities in the survey question regarding current use need to be reduced, perhaps with an added probe question for non-permanent methods. (shrink)

Annual reports are an important element in the genre of corporate public discourse. The reporting practices mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for all publicly traded corporations are intended to render the annual reports a legitimate and trustworthy medium through which management communicates information related to the financial performance of the firm. The following discussion represents an inaugural attempt to investigate the ethical characteristics of the discourse found in corporate annual reports using Habermas' principles of communicative (...) action. In preparing the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) portion of the report, managers are charged with providing narrative information for investors and other interested third parties relevant to assessing the firm's financial condition. Previous rhetorical studies of the narrative portions of annual reports argue that they serve as means for both legitimate and distorted communication. We investigate this communication medium through the lens of Habermas' norms for communicative action, which require communicators to be comprehensible, truthful, sincere, and legitimate. The study represents an initial attempt to operationalization Habermas' principles of communicative action and to employ a methodology that facilitates their application to research within a business context. From one perspective, consistent with agency theory as specified by neoclassical economics, it would seem that firms anticipating worse-than-expected financial performance would be less likely to exhibit the Habermasian principles necessary for undistorted communication because they would attempt to strategically influence the message being communicated about the firm's financial position. Instead, employing rhetorical analysis software, Diction 5.0, we found that firms expecting both good and bad earnings surprises exhibited a higher level of communicative action than a composite average firm. Although preliminary in nature, our findings suggest that firms anticipating large earnings surprises, either high or low, use the narrative portion of the annual report as a vehicle through which to communicate information about managements' veracity and trustworthiness as well as the firm's financial position. (shrink)

First-person reports are central to the study of subjective well-being in contemporary psychology, but there is much disagreement about exactly what sort of first-person reports should be used. This paper examines an influential proposal to replace all first-person reports of life satisfaction with introspective reports of affect. I argue against the reasoning behind this proposal, and propose instead a new strategy for deciding what measure is appropriate.

In response to an article by Waring, Creider, Tarpey and Black, the author argues that the nature of the analytic aims of a research project determines whether or not participants’ reported goals and motives are relevant and useful. Her position is that for traditional conversation analytic studies aimed at explicating culturally shared methods for producing conversational actions and for interpreting interactional behavior, participants’ reports of their goals and motives are irrelevant. She differentiates between explanations based on participants’ reports (...) of their goals and motives and conversation analytic explanations consisting of preferences or principles to which members of a culture orient while interacting. (shrink)

Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it (...) is hard to see how we could reasonably be confident in a counterfactual whose consequent can be true only if a certain very finely tuned microphysical configuration obtains. This essay develops the foregoing puzzle and explores several possible solutions. (shrink)

I'd like to present a puzzle about belief reports that's been nagging at me for several years. I've subjected many friends and audiences to various abortive attempts at solving it. Now it's time to get it off my chest and let others try their hand at it.<1>.

I observe that the “concept-generator” theory of Percus and Sauerland (2003), Anand (2006), and Charlow and Sharvit (2014) does not predict an intuitive true interpretation of the sentence “Plato did not believe that Hesperus was Phosphorus”. In response, I present a simple theory of attitude reports which employs a fine-grained semantics for names, according to which names which intuitively name the same thing may have distinct compositional semantic values. This simple theory solves the problem with the concept-generator theory, but, (...) as I go on to show, it has problems of its own. I present three examples which the concept-generator theory can accommodate, but the simple fine-grained theory cannot. These examples motivate the full theory of the paper, which combines the basic ideas behind the concept-generator theory with a fine-grained semantics for names. The examples themselves are of interest independently of my theory: two of them constrain the original concept-generator theory more tightly than previously discussed examples had. (shrink)

Periodical reports are important information sources for investors and society to monitor, contribute to, and allocate resources to listed companies contributing to environmental sustainability. This article provides a preliminary investigation into environment-related information disclosure in annual reports of 61 representative companies in Vietnam, a country that has a rapidly developing stock market and is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. It was found that although most of the companies’ reports disclosed the goals to pursue sustainability (...) and environmental protection (over 93%), only one-third of them genuinely reported investment in or research on environmental directions. The proportion of companies reporting detailed information on greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, water consumption, and waste production is relatively low; even among leading companies in sustainable development, the reporting rates for these indicators remained below 60%. We suggest that a separate mandatory annual report on environmental issues will increase businesses’ and society’s consciousness of environmental impacts. Transparent disclosure of environmental information will also offer an avenue to empower society to monitor, participate, and steer businesses toward sustainable development, thereby fostering an eco-surplus culture throughout the economic system. (shrink)

The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this "Specification Assumption", that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuitively more (...) plausible approach to the semantics of belief reports. But this approach must confront a puzzle of its own: it turns out that every case is a Paderewski case, at least potentially. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a well-known theory of belief reports from an important objection. The theory is Russellianism, sometimes also called `neo-Russellianism', `Millianism', `the direct reference theory', `the "Fido"-Fido theory', or `the naive theory'. The objection concernssubstitution of co-referring names in belief sentences. Russellianism implies that any two belief sentences, that differ only in containing distinct co-referring names, express the same proposition (in any given context). Since `Hesperus' and `Phosphorus' both refer to the planet Venus, this view implies (...) that all utterances of (1) and.. (shrink)

Introspective reports are used as sources of information about other minds, in both everyday life and science. Many scientists and philosophers consider this practice unjustified, while others have made the untestable assumption that introspection is a truthful method of private observation. I argue that neither skepticism nor faith concerning introspective reports are warranted. As an alternative, I consider our everyday, commonsensical reliance on each other’s introspective reports. When we hear people talk about their minds, we neither refuse (...) to learn from nor blindly accept what they say. Sometimes we accept what we are told, other times we reject it, and still other times we take the report, revise it in light of what we believe, then accept the modified version. Whatever we do, we have (implicit) reasons for it. In developing a sound methodology for the scientific use of introspective reports, we can take our commonsense treatment of introspective reports and make it more explicit and rigorous. We can discover what to infer from introspective reports in a way similar to how we do it every day, but with extra knowledge, methodological care, and precision. Sorting out the use of introspective reports as sources of data is going to be a painstaking, piecemeal task, but it promises to enhance our science of the mind and brain. (shrink)

Company disclosures are often looked at as narrative rather than argumentative or directive texts. And yet “irrealis” statements – references to future or hypothetical processes – do play a role and contribute greatly to the construction of corporate identity. Combining a corpus and a discourse perspective, the paper looks at references to the future in a corpus of CSR reports. After a preliminary analysis of frequency data, a case study of markers of futurity is presented, focusing on ways of (...) expressing prediction or commitment, together with attitudinal values or evaluations of importance. Keywords and phraseology are studied to highlight how prediction and commitment statements are used to legitimize the company’s conduct. (shrink)

The concept of general arousal has a long history in emotion research. However, the concept is more complex and nuanced than is generally appreciated. In this comment, we note some of the early conceptualizations of arousal and how they might comport with more modern representations of the construct. Importantly, we show how modern conceptualizations which incorporate the physiological complexity of arousal measurement and peripheral-central nervous system interactions might help to provide a more solid framework for the construct moving forward. The (...) authors of the target article are to be commended for addressing this important issue. (shrink)

This is a study of the syntax and semantics of reports containing speech-act and propositional attitude verbs with quotational complements. I make the case that while the quotational complements of some verbs, including _utter_, are nominal and metalinguistic, those of others, including _assert_ and _believe_, are clausal and nonmetalinguistic. Quotational reports with ‘say’ are ambiguous. When quotational complements are clausal, they are like _that_-clauses in being subordinate content clauses with main-clause form. Unlike _that_-clauses, quote-clauses force deictic shift and (...) are unambiguously opaque. I also argue that quotation marks serve a different function in “mixed” reports, and that use of the traditional “direct” and “indirect” is not consistent with their traditional definitions. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship examining clinical outcomes in medical travel for cosmetic surgery identifies cases in which patients traveled abroad for medical procedures and subsequently returned home with infections and other surgical complications. Though there are peer‐reviewed articles identifying patient deaths in cases where patients traveled abroad for commercial kidney transplantation or stem cell injections, no scholarly publications document deaths of patients who traveled abroad for cosmetic surgery or bariatric surgery. Drawing upon news media reports extending from 1993 to 2011, this (...) article identifies and describes twenty‐six reported cases of deaths of individuals who traveled abroad for cosmetic surgery or bariatric surgery. Over half of the reported deaths occurred in two countries. Analysis of these news reports cannot be used to make causal claims about why the patients died. In addition, cases identified in news media accounts do not provide a basis for establishing the relative risk of traveling abroad for care instead of seeking elective cosmetic surgery at domestic health care facilities. Acknowledging these limitations, the case reports suggest the possibility that contemporary peer‐reviewed scholarship is underreporting patient mortality in medical travel. The paper makes a strong case for promoting normative analyses and empirical studies of medical travel. In particular, the paper argues that empirically informed ethical analysis of ‘medical tourism’ will benefit from rigorous studies tracking global flows of medical travelers and the clinical outcomes they experience. The paper contains practical recommendations intended to promote debate concerning how to promote patient safety and quality of care in medical travel. (shrink)

Research by academics, professional organizations, and businesses on ethics in the workplace often relies on surveys that ask employees to report how frequently they have observed others engaging in unethical behavior. But what do these frequencies in observer-reports say about the frequencies of committed unethical behavior? This paper is the first to address this question by empirically exploring the relationship between observer- and self-reports. Our survey research among the Swiss working population shows that for all 37 different forms (...) of unethical behavior investigated, observer-reports show higher frequencies than self-reports. Ratios of observer- to self-reports vary substantially among these forms, ranging from 1.46 for improperly gathering competitor’s confidential information to 6.4 for engaging in (sexual) harassment or creating a hostile work environment. The results indicate that researchers should not assume that the frequency in self-reports can generally be approximated by the frequency in observer-reports. Four possible explanations are presented for the differences in ratios, with recommendations for future research. (shrink)