Belief-in is belief-that with affectivity and evidentiality

Belief-in reports of the form 'S believes in O' have been taken to have at least two senses: factual and evaluative. I begin by briefly suggesting that there is no evidence for two distinct senses, then spend most of the paper developing a general semantics for belief-in reports. I explore, and use my semantics to explain, several features of belief-in reports: the context-dependence of what belief-that reports they entail, their widespread lack of equivalence with belief-that reports, and their neg-raising property. Put roughly, my semantics says that 'S believes in O' a) asserts that, for some contextually salient property F, S believes that O has F and b) presupposes that S either has a belief that O has F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement or has a belief that O doesn’t have F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement.

Publication Details

Journal
Open Journal Systems (Global Science & Technology Forum)
Published
2024-12-17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2024.v28.1172
Primary Topic
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Belief-in is belief-that with affectivity and evidentiality

Open Journal Systems (Global Science & Technology Forum)
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
article

Belief-in is belief-that with affectivity and evidentiality

article en

Abstract

Belief-in reports of the form 'S believes in O' have been taken to have at least two senses: factual and evaluative. I begin by briefly suggesting that there is no evidence for two distinct senses, then spend most of the paper developing a general semantics for belief-in reports. I explore, and use my semantics to explain, several features of belief-in reports: the context-dependence of what belief-that reports they entail, their widespread lack of equivalence with belief-that reports, and their neg-raising property. Put roughly, my semantics says that 'S believes in O' a) asserts that, for some contextually salient property F, S believes that O has F and b) presupposes that S either has a belief that O has F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement or has a belief that O doesn’t have F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement.

Open Journal Systems (Global Science & Technology Forum)
Openalex Percentile: Top 34%
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
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