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What Is De Re & De Dicto?

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What Is De Re & De Dicto? De re is less favorable than de dicto –An experimental investigation of belief report Yuhan Zhang & Kathryn Davidson yuz551@g.harvard.edu PLC 2020, March 27th – 29th 1 Introduction to the de re & de dicto distinctions Content Motivations for the empirical investigation The agreement rating experiment Results and implications 2 Latin origin de re: “about the thing” de dicto: “about the statement” Nowadays, when a DP appears inside a clausal or VP complement of an intensional operator, we say that de re & de dicto ambiguity can be observed in this interaction. What is de re (1) Mary wants to marry a fisherman. & de dicto ? Truth condition of de re : Mary wants to marry John. I know John is a fisherman. To report Mary’s desire, I utter (1). This sentence is also true even if John’s secret job is fisherman and Mary doesn’t know this. Truth condition of de dicto : Mary wants to marry whoever is a fisherman. Mary might not have a particular person in her mind, but she is definitely sure that her future husband’s occupation would be fisherman. von Fintel & Heim, 2011; Cable, 2018 3 The ambiguities do not arise from the DP itself, but from the interaction between the DP and the intensional operator. DPs interact (1) Mary wants to marry a fisherman. (ambiguous) with the (2) Mary marries a fisherman. (unambiguous) Other types of DP/IO: intensional DP: indefinite NP, definite NP, proper name, QNP, someone, etc. operator Intensional operator: Psychological attitude verb, epistemic verb, perceptual verb, communication verb, model auxiliary, model adverbial (Partee, 1990) Temporal adverbial (Keshet & Schwarz, 2019) 4 (3) Ralph believes that someone is a spy. (Quine, 1956) de re: There is someone whom Ralph believes to be a spy. de dicto: Ralph believes there are spies. (4) John wants to talk to the boy who faileD the exam. (FoDor, 1970) More de re: There is a boy who faileD the exam anD John wants to talk to him. examples de dicto: John wants to talk to whoever faileD the exam anD John might not know who the boy is. (5) In 1978, the presiDent acquireD a skyscraper in New York City. de re: The current president (D. Trump) acquired the skyscraper in 1978. de dicto: The president in 1978 (J. Carter) acquireD the skyscraper in 1978. 5 Crack the distinction via “a possible world evaluation strategy” Two worlds involved in this ambiguity. de re: the target DP is evaluated to be true in the real world (transparent) de dicto: the target DP is evaluated to be true in the intensional world (opaque) (1) Mary wants to marry a fisherman. Distinguishing de re: ∃x[fishermanw(x)] & ∀w’ ∈ WANT(Mary, w): marryw’(Mary)(x) de dicto: ∀w’ ∈ WANT(Mary, w): ∃x[fishermanw’ (x) & marryw’(Mary)(x)] strategies Resulting properties de re: The target DP refers to a specific entity in the real world. The belief holder might not know that this entity is denoted by the target DP. de dicto: In the belief holder’s mind/mental state, he/she knows that the entity is denoted by the target DP. Reliance on the context for distinction (von Fintel & Heim, 2011) Specific contexts could be conjured up so that only one reading is possible. There are other contexts where both readings are available. Note: The formal representation of de re & de dicto assumes the ambiguity results from the scope interaction between the DP and the intensional operator.6 This is only one of the existing theories. See Percus (2000), Keshet (2008), and Elliott (2020) for more extensions, repairs, and other treatments. Even if it is claimed that certain contexts could be made so that both readings are true, there is still an issue of acceptability or accessibility. (6) US forces in Iraq have intentionally killed 12 journalists. (Language Log, 2005) de dicto: It is the US forces’ intention to target and kill journalists. (favored) de re: The US forces were trying to kill people but they didn’t know that Problems with they were shooting at journalists. de re & de (7) Sally believes that her brother is happy. (Nelson, 2019) Context: Sally hears a man singing on the street and believes that man is dicto happy without knowing that man is her brother. judgments “The de re reading is not acceptable because Sally doesn’t conceptualize the man as her brother.” The interpretation of statute is biased towards the de re reading. (Anderson, 2013) 7 When a context permits both de re and de dicto Research readings, would people actually access both Question readings equally successfully? Null hypothesis predicted by the theories: They should be equally accessible given a context that permits both. 8 Online Agreement Rating Task Participants Experimental 120 native speakers of English (75 male/45 female) were recruiteD from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to reaD four stories anD rate their Method agreement for four statements per story The average completion time was 9.2 minutes (+/- 5.14 min) with a $2 compensation. 9 Context Julie is one of the judges of an ongoing poetry competition. The best poem that she has read so far is an extremely intriguing poem about the ocean. She believes that this poem will win the competition. Julie remembers being told that Nicole, one of the best-known poets, submitted a poem about the ocean to the competition. Therefore, Julie concludes that this poem must be written by Nicole and the first prize will be going to her. However, this poem was actually written by Materials Elizabeth, a younger and lesser-known poet. It is just a coincidence that the two poets wrote about the same topic. Question According to this story, please use the slider bars to indicate to what extent you agree or disagree with the following four statements. 10 Statements (randomized in display) [target ] (only one statement is shown to each participant) Julie believes that Elizabeth’s poem will win the competition. (de re) Julie believes that Nicole’s poem will win the competition. (de dicto) [definitely correct] Elizabeth is a young poet. Materials [definitely wrong] Elizabeth and Nicole met each other and decided that they will both write poems about the ocean. [uncertain] Julie will also be the judge for the poetry competition next year. 11 Three practice statement trials Within-Subject Design Each participant read a list of four different stories.Two of them were randomly chosen to appear with de re statements and the other two with de dicto statements. The order of the four stories were randomized. Procedure The number of times each story gets the de re statement vs. the de dicto statement was counterbalanced across participants. The order of the four statements within a story was randomized. The position of the “Highly Agree” label was also counterbalanced such that only half of the time it was on the right side. 12 Data Screening Delete the participants who failed to use the slider correctly in the practice trial (117 participants remained). Delete the four data points in a story when participants gave wrong judgments of the definitely correct and definitely wrong statements (415 sets of four data points remained). The functions of the other three statements Data analysis Attention checker Baseline for comparison against the critical judgment 13 Results • The majority of de dicto and de re statements are agreed upon. • The agreement rating of de re statements are more diverse, sometimes falling in the “disagree” realm. 14 Results • A story effect exists – while all the de dicto statements were highly agreed upon across the four stories, the de re interpretation was only highly disliked in story c. 15 Results 16 Frequency de dicto de re Total agree 203 131 334 disagree 5 76 81 Statistical Total 208 207 415 inference Pearson’s Chi-squared test: X2 = 75.59, df = 1, p < .001 There is a significant condition effect where the de re reading is more likely to be disagreed. 17 Mixed effect logistic regression Use downscaled binary data (agree vs. disagree) Model: binary ~ condition + story + (1|subject) Main effect of the de re condition (ß = -3.64, z = -6.50, p < .001) Main effect of the story c (ß = -1.30, z = -2.64, p = .008) Modeling Mixed effect linear regression Use the original continuous agreement rating data Model: rating ~ condition + story + (1|subject) No main effect of any variable Could be due to ill fitness of the linear model 18 In this experiment, we conjured up four similar stories involving misidentification to gauge participants’ agreement rating to de re statements and de dicto statements. We found that while the agreement of de dicto statements were at ceiling, the de re statements were less agreed. Conclusions & The null hypothesis is rejected – there are two separate factors Discussions affecting semantic judgments: (1) the availability of a reading; (2) the accessibility of a reading. The result corresponds to the example of ‘US forces’ but not the cases in law. A main story effect also suggests that different genres of contexts might affect the accessibility of the de re & de dicto reading. 19 Create a systematic variation of contexts for comparison Create a systematic variation of NP structures See if other intensional operators (e.g. the temporal adverbial) can also generate an asymmetric accessibility of de re and de dicto Future reading. Directions Suggestions are welcome! (Feel free to drop a line to yuz551@g.harvard.edu) Acknowledgement Shannon Bryant, Gunnar Lund, Masoud Jasbi, Joshua Martin, JacK Robinovitch, Jesse SnedeKer, and members of Meaning & Modality Lab at Harvard University. 20 Anderson, J. C. (2013). Misreading like a lawyer: cognitive bias in statutory interpretation.
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