RESPonsible attitudes: The case of Italian 'considerare'

Abstract

This paper investigates the intentional component of the Italian verb considerare (‘consider’), distinguishing it from the purely doxastic verb credere (‘believe’) and the experiential subjective attitude verb trovare (‘find’). Building on linguistic diagnostics proposed by Farkas (1988) and Barker (2002), we show that considerare patterns with verbs that encode agentive responsibility and discretionary evaluation. We argue that this component aligns considerare with evaluative subjectivity and propose a formal decision-theoretic model to capture its semantics.