Conceptual structure of attitudes: Language and Cognition

Organizers: Natasha Korotkova (Utrecht University) and Salvador Mascarenhas (ENS)

When: August 3-14, 2026

Where: Prague, Czech Republic

Propositional attitudes, linguistically expressed with predicates like “believe”, “intend”, “know” or “want”, constitute one of the central topics in linguistics and philosophy, and they are the foundation of belief-desire-intention psychology. Propositional attitudes allow us to express key aspects of our mental lives for external use in communication and internal use in reasoning. This workshop, to take place during the 37th edition of ESSLLI (European Summer School on Language, Logic and Information), aims at assessing the state of the art on propositional attitudes and identifying areas for interdisciplinary collaborations. The workshop financially supported by NWO (grant 406.XS.25.01.105; PI Korotkova).

In linguistics and philosophy of language, research on propositional attitudes was fundamental in shaping our understanding of the nature of meaning and semantic objects, proceeding in parallel to research on modality in natural language. More recently, there has been a steady interest in the fine-grained semantics of attitude predicates that draws on the material of an array of languages (Georgian, Koryak, Mandarin Chinese, Navajo, Nez Perce, Polish, Slovene, Turkish, to name a few) and pays serious attention to the interaction between verb meaning and the syntactic shape of the complement. This work has dramatically increased the empirical coverage of linguistic theory and improved our understanding of broad classes found within attitude predicates that reflect differences in their core semantics. However, with few exceptions, linguistic research on attitude predicates has remained largely disconnected from the vast body of literature concerned with the very nature of mental attitudes.

In philosophy of mind and intentional psychology, attention has chiefly been directed at the role of propositional attitudes as causes of other mental states and of interactions with the environment, focusing especially on experiments testing the behavioral consequences of attitudes.. Doxastic attitudes have played a key role in this literature, in particular “know” and “believe”. Perhaps the best known topic of research on attitudes within this tradition is theory of mind, the capacity to represent and reason with other individuals' mental states, in particular, extensive debates about the preschoolers’ ability to attribute false beliefs to other agents and what this ability tells us about cognition at large. This vast literature illustrates quite clearly the importance of attitudes in cognition, however, despite its high relevance for, and reliance on, is largely disconnected from the research on the language of propositional attitudes.

These traditions show considerable overlap and complementarity, yet their interaction over the past twenty years has been limited. In this interdisciplinary workshop, we bridge this gap by bringing together researchers from these different fields whose work bears on propositional attitude, thus creating a platform for discussion of the role of attitudes in cognition and communication and laying out the groundwork for future interdisciplinary collaborations.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of subtopics of interest. Note that this is an interdisciplinary workshop on one of the broadest research topics in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. As such we are entirely open to highly original submissions on non-traditional subtopics within our theme, provided that the authors are prepared to give a presentation to a varied audience with diverse backgrounds. We especially welcome submissions about work in progress, including from PhD students.

Invited speakers: