Attitude ascriptions and speech reports are a litmus test for any semantic theory. They were at the center of discussion when philosophers and logicians became interested in natural language and began to develop the semantic frameworks we are relying on today. Mastery of attitude ascriptions and speech reports is a milestone in the cognitive development of a child and the human species as a whole. 

Attitude and speech reports are built from smaller building blocks that combine and recombine to produce the interpretations those reports have. My lectures will be a search for those building blocks and for clues about how they might interact with each other. The goal – like that of any semantic theory – is a typology where the combinatorics of building blocks generates the range of possible interpretations of the constructions we are trying to understand.

The lectures were recorded, but, unfortunately, there were technical problems with the audio and video equipment in the lecture room.

Here is the link to the slides for the lectures:

And here is a link to the précis of the lectures that appeared in the 2023 edition of the Oxford Philosophy Magazine:

Lecture 1 'The puzzles: What we are trying to understand'

Lecture 2 'Reporting what we say'

Lecture 3 'Modal building blocks'

Lecture 4 'Reporting what we know'

Lecture 5 'Reporting what we believe'

Lecture 6 'Towards a typology'