ABSTRACT
The quantifier over states is motivated independently by the need to handle adverbs such as ‘firmly’ on analogy with adverbs for event verbs.3 I abbreviate ‘s is at t a belief state of x’ as ‘belief(s, t, x)’. I abbreviate ‘is true taken as if spoken by u at t’ as ‘is true(u, t)’. An attitude report is first-order if its complement sentence is not an attitude report. It is second-order if its complement sentence is first-order, and so on. The relation expressed by ‘x interpreted relative to u at t indicates-the-contentof y’ in the first-order case requires that x have the same representational content as y. The story is more complicated for higher-order attributions. See (Ludwig 1998, 148-150) for details. I abbreviate ‘indicates-the-content-of’ as ‘ ø ‘, and further abbreviate ‘interpreted relative to u at t that the earth moves ø s’ as ‘ ø (s, that the earth moves, u, t)’. [1a] may then be rewritten as [1b]. [1b] ‘Galileo believed that the earth moves’ is true(u, t) iff (’t0: t0 , t)(’s)
(belief(s, t0, Galileo) and ø (s, that the earth moves, u, t)). The expression ‘that the earth moves’ refers to a sentence but its semantic function is not exhausted by the fact that it refers to ‘the earth moves’ as in the case of the classical account of quotation names, for it has a feature quotation names lack. One can understand a quotation name without understanding the expression it names.4 However, one cannot understand the noun phrase ‘that the earth moves’ unless one understands ‘the earth moves’. For its function in the language depends on auditors understanding the embedded sentence, even though this does not figure in the truth conditions. For example,
‘La Terre si muove’ in Italian means that the earth moves is true just in case the complement sentence means the same as ‘La Terre si muove’, but it fails in its purpose if the auditor fails to understand the complement sentence. Uses of quotation marks to represent dialogue in a novel, or to indicate that one is quoting another’s words, function similarly. This ensures that one cannot understand (1) without understanding the complement sentence and so being in a position to know what Galileo believes.
