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Prototypes, Belief Ascriptions, and Ambiguity
Henry Jackman
Presented at the APA Central Division Meeting, April 2000.
Area 1 Philosophy of Language
None
Keywords  
http://www.yorku.ca/hjackman/papers/dedicto-dere.pdf
Many philosophers have suggested that belief predicates are ambiguous between a de dicto and a de re reading. However, the impression of ambiguity is a function of the narrow ranges of examples that philosophers focus on. When we consider our ascriptional practices as a whole, the suggestion that belief predicates are ambiguous is neither plausible nor needed to explain the de dicto/de re distinction. This paper will argue that understanding paradigmatic de dicto and de re ascriptions in terms of disavowals from a more basic sort of ascription is preferable to positing an ambiguity in which each of the two sorts of ascription are conceptually primitive.