Situations and Attitudes

Abstract Reading the early work in logic by Frege and Russell, one can hardly fail to be struck by the extent to which their thinking was shaped by a concern to understand the verbs of cognitive attitudes, verbs like wonder, believe, and know. In spite of this concern, and all the subsequent progress in logic, there is still no satisfactory systematic account of the logic of the attitudes. In this paper we outline an approach which we believe will lead to a satisfactory and systematic account. For our sample of verbs we take see, know, believe, and say. Situations are basic an ubiquitous. We are always in some situation or other. Human cognitive activity categorizes these situations in terms of objects having…