Hyungeol Lee

This paper introduces François Recanati's theory of belief report and provides a critical review of his theory. "Belief report" is an expression or action by which a speaker reports a subject's belief to another hearer. Recanati's theory of belief report can be used to illuminate the mechanism behind the occurrence of the phenomenon called "the puzzle about belief." This refers to the phenomenon where it seems that a substitution of a referring expression in a belief ascription sentence for another co-referring expression results in a change in the truth value of the sentence. Since Frege's first serious presentation of this phenomenon as problematic, it has long been at the center of a heated discussion between those who sought to provide a substantive theory of language. Behind those discussions lies the rich context of the debate between neo-Fregeans and neo-Russellians on the semantic content of thought, and pragmatics, which flourished on the foundation that Paul Grice had built. For example, Kripke and Richard, who questioned the puzzle's origin, presented their versions of the puzzle about belief, concluding that Frege's strategy for dealing with the puzzle cannot be a final solution. In the first chapter of this paper, each of Frege's, Kripke's, and Richard's puzzles about belief will be presented, followed by a description of an attempt to explain the puzzle by the theorist himself or others. After that, a critical evaluation of each attempt will be provided. Recanati's theory of belief report is introduced in the second chapter of this paper. Recanati's theory exhibits the feature of incorporating both neo-Fregean and neo-Russellian insights on thought content and cognitive significance. Also, his theory is a pragmatics-based speaker-meaning theory that divides the context of successful communication of a subject's belief according to the speaker's intention. Following the introduction of Recanati's theory, it will be applied to each of Frege's, Kripke's, and Richard's puzzles to test whether his theory is a viable tool for elucidating the puzzles. It turns out that his theory has the following advantages: first, it can explain the communication of a subject's belief between participants in a conversation. Second, it captures the changeable intuition of what is said by belief reports. Third, his theory illuminates the mechanism behind the occurrence of the puzzle about belief. In the third chapter, this paper will critically evaluate his theory. This will allow us to review his theory from metaphysical, and epistemological perspectives. Keywords François Recanati, belief report, belief ascription, puzzle about belief, propositional attitude, propositional attitude report, semantics, pragmatics.

This study aimed to explore the psychophysical bases of multisensory surface stickiness perception by investigating how sensitively humans perceive different levels of stickiness intensity conveyed by auditory, tactile, and visual cues. First, we sorted five different sticky stimuli by perceived intensity in ascending order for each modality separately and evaluated the discrimination sensitivities of each participant using a fitted psychometric curve. Results showed that perceptual intensity orders were not identical to physical intensity order and that the sequential order of perceived intensities for different modalities was inconsistent. Moreover, estimated perceptual sensitivities to surface stickiness indicated that auditory cues result in better discrimination sensitivity than tactile and visual cues. Second, we calculated the relative perceptual distances of stickiness intensities using multidimensional scaling. A follow-up statistical test demonstrated that the perceptual mapping of vision and touch are similar but that auditory perception is different. These results suggest that the discriminability of stickiness intensity is best served by auditory cues and that texture information processing in the auditory domain is distinctive from that of other modalities.