A ‘situated’ solution to prior’s substitution problem

Abstract

In the complements of many DP/CP-neutral attitude verbs (e.g. remember, fear, see), CPs resist the truth-preserving substitution by a DP of the form ‘the proposition [CP  ]’. This substitution is often perceived as involving a shift in verb-reading from a reading in which the semantic value of the complement serves as the content of the attitude to a reading in which it serves as the object towards which the attitude is directed (see Moltmann’s 2003 objectivization effect). This paper provides a uniform account of the above phenomena that uses the particular pragmatic properties of the situation that serves as the internal argument of the attitude report. The resulting account is inspired by Pietroski (2000) and Forbes’ (2018) account of the objectivization effect and by Moltmann’s (2003) ‘unique determination’-strategy for the explanation of DP/CP substitution behavior. The account improves upon other accounts by explaining both the substitution behavior and the objectivization effect, and by explaining the validity (for some verbs) of the CP’s substitution by DPs like ‘the fact [CP  ]’ or ‘the possibility [CP  ]’.