Questions in belief ascriptions

Abstract

Recent literature (Schmitt 2020; Haslinger and Schmitt 2021; Pasternak 2018b; Marty 2019) has discussed cases in which belief ascription to a plurality of attitude holders can be construed non-distributively. While some of these cases have been accounted for as instances of cumulativity between the attitude holders and a plurality of contents, the cases put forward in Pasternak (2018b) resist an analysis along these lines. This paper builds on Pasternak’s (2018b) account, fixing its shortcomings and in so doing argues for a semantics of belief ascriptions in which belief is always interpreted relative to a question (cf. Yalcin 2016) and belief states are not just sets of possible worlds, but sets of classical propositions (as all propositions and questions are for Ciardelli et al. 2019).