Locating Hidden Quantifiers in De Re Reports

Abstract

The present paper is a contribution to the debate on the nature of quantification over modes of presentation in de re attitude reports. I show in Section 3 that the “universal” readings of de re reports with the quantifier no cannot result from a special “universal” reading of the attitude verb, contra a recent proposal by Charlow and Sharvit [3] reviewed in Section 2. Then I outline an account which has the advantages of Charlow and Sharvit’s and of Santorio’s [15] accounts, but in addition can handle “universal” readings (Section 4). The account is then shown to extend to another class of examples [3] discusses (Section 5). The main feature of my account is that the attitude verb does not bind concept generator variables; this work is relegated to the special operator, crucially lower in the structure.