This chapter applies the treatments of world-binding and assignment-binding from Chapter 3 to several examples with attitude ascriptions. Semantically modal elements such as attitude verbs are treated as introducing quantification over assignments. The account captures phenomena with intensionality, shifted interpretations of world pronouns, and local/global readings of context-sensitive expressions via general mechanisms of movement and variable binding. Topics of discussion include quantification and assignment modification in the metalanguage, de re and de dicto readings, binding with pronouns vs. traces, and shifted interpretations of modals and proper names. A speculative predicativist analysis of names is developed; bare singular uses are analyzed as predicates with an implicit choice-function pronoun.

This chapter draws on independent work on the syntax–semantics interface to motivate a more complex clausal architecture for an assignment-variable-based theory. Binding across syntactic categories and semantic domains is captured uniformly from a generalized binder-index feature, which attaches directly to expressions undergoing movement for type reasons. World-binding (intensionality) arises from the complementizer, which moves from the world-argument position of the clause’s main predicate; assignment-binding arises from modal elements, which move from an internal assignment-argument position of the complementizer. The semantics is fully compositional. The remainder of the book develops the account and applies it to a range of constructions and types of linguistic shifting phenomena.

This chapter introducesattitude reports in possible worlds semantics, with attention to the motivation of such an approach and its main challenges, and the major revisions and alternatives that such challenges have prompted. We begin with a brief introduction to possible worlds semantics. We then sketch Jaakko Hintikka’s highly influential possible worlds-based approach to attitude reports and outline the key predictions that it makes. We discuss the problem of logical omniscience that Hintikka’s approach faces, and outline two competing approaches for solving it. We then turn to the more basic problem of logical equivalence that any approach to attitude reports in possible worlds semantics faces; we discuss several solution strategies thatgo under the name ‘hyperintensionality’ in that they proffer ways of modeling propositions that achieve a finer grain than do possible worlds. A recurring question in this discussion is: Which of our intuitions about inference patterns in attitude reports reflect semantic reasoning, and which reflect pragmatic or extra-linguistic reasoning? Finally, we explore two competing hypotheses regarding the compositional semantics of attitude reports.

Situating Cassirer in a historical perspective, Daniel D. Dahlstrom's chapter casts light on prominent lines of convergence and divergence between Husserl’s phenomenological analyses and Cassirer’s philosophical studies. The general topic of the first line of convergence is logical theory, as Husserl and Cassirer both argue for the autonomy of logic, the promise of set theory, and the intensionality of concepts.Other lines of agreement include their common rejection of empiricist accounts of abstraction and universals, their embrace of a Kantian philosophical legacy, and their respective commitments to the primacy of meaning and self-described versions of idealism. Nevertheless, the philosophies of Husserl and Cassirer diverge from one another in significant ways, primarily in view of the thematic range of their investigations and their respective insistence upon intuition and the sign or symbol as the basis of human consciousness and cognition. Dahlstrom focuses on differences in Husserl and Cassirer's analyses of intuitions and perceptions that Cassirer himself also pronounced.