ESSLLI 2026

On the plurality of verbs: Attitudes of knowledge and belief

Propositional attitude reports — expressed by predicates like “believe”, “intend”, “know”, “want” — are a foundational topic in linguistics and philosophy of language. Research on attitudes sits at the intersection of several areas: the syntax of clausal complementation, the semantics of intensional environments, the nature of meaning, the structure of mental representations. Initial work suggested that such predicates can be attributed the same basic semantics, but already early work in formal semantics has shown that they aren’t in fact created equal. This begs the following questions: what natural classes are there within attitude predicates and what are the cognitive underpinnings behind those classes? A useful parallel here is research on modality in natural language: while modal words such as “can” or “must” exhibit many similarities that can be captured within a unified framework, modals of different varieties often exhibit properties that warrant a special treatment.

Recently, there has been an explosion of cross-linguistic work on the fine-grained semantics of attitude predicates, with a special focus on such issues as: mood choice, complement selection, new and old puzzles on presupposition projection, question embedding. This line of research seeks to identify broad classes within attitude predicates and to establish correlations between their different properties. However, with few exceptions, this fruitful research agenda is largely disconnected from the vast body of work within philosophy of mind and psychology that is concerned with the nature of mental attitudes.

We know that some properties of goals, e.g., rationality, are instrumental in understanding the properties of language that describes them, including predicates like “plan” and “intend” and other deliberative environments. Likewise, the distinction between propositional vs. episodic memory is helpful in understanding the properties of memory reports with predicates like “remember”. To what extent is this generalizable—in other words, to what extent does the linguistic behavior of attitude predicates reflect the underlying differences in the attitudes they describe? The overarching goal of this course is to address this central question via a multi-faceted guided tour of the natural classes found in the domain of doxastic predicates, those that talk about knowledge and belief. The course will scrutinize different types of such verbs by looking beyond ‘know’ and ‘think’, with an eye on elucidating subtle linguistic distinctions between them. It takes inspiration in classical work within lexical semantics on natural classes within ‘ordinary’, non-attitude predicates and seeks to understand what kind of cognitive primitives may be at play with their attitude cousins, focusing to the core concepts of ‘knowledge’, ‘evidence’ and ‘belief’ and their linguistic manifestations in the attitudinal domain.

Preliminary schedule:

  • Day 1: attitudes at large, linguistic encoding of 'knowledge' and 'belief'
  • Day 2: factivity and its sources
  • Day 3: 'come-to-know' predicates as a natural class
  • Day 4: subjective attitudes and find-verbs across languages
  • Day 5: general overview, possible taxonomies of doxastic predicates

    • Course materials: to appear here in due time! Stay tuned.