Referential Dependencies Between Conflicting Attitudes

A number of puzzles about propositional attitudes in semantics and philosophy revolve around apparent referential dependencies between different attitudes within a single agent’s mental state. In a series of papers, Hans Kamp (2003… 2015) offers a general framework for describing such interconnected attitude complexes, building on DRT and dynamic semantics. I demonstrate that Kamp’s proposal cannot deal with referential dependencies between semantically conflicting attitudes, such as those in Ninan’s (21) puzzle about de re imagination. To solve the problem I propose to replace Kamp’s treatment of attitudes as context change potentials with a two-dimensional analysis.