Let us start with a demarcation of the field of our interest. By ‘non-doxastic’ attitudes, we mean a loosely defined type of mental states held by human agents with desire, approval, fear, or regret being their prototypical examples. Typically, attitude verbs used to report on this kind of mental states have a semantic component of an agent being in favour of something (e.g., pro-attitudes such as ‘want’ or ‘be glad’) or against something (e.g., con-attitude such as ‘fear’ or ‘feel sorry’). Non-doxastic attitudes verbs take as an object of the attitudes a nominal argument (e.g., ‘Mark desires a career as a computer programmer’) or a clausal component when it is used to ascribe a propositional attitude. Some non-doxastic attitude ascriptions lack a cognitive element (i.e., people’s belief or knowledge of the attitude content), they also do not imply that the content of an ascription refers to a fact:

(2) Mark fears that the philosophy classes next year will be online.

⇏ i. Mark knows/believes that the philosophy classes next year are online.

⇏ ii. The philosophy classes next year will be online.

However, the cognitive component is not necessarily absent in non-doxastic attitudes. For example, in sentence (3) the verb ‘is glad’ is not only factive, but it also implies the agent’s knowledge about that fact:

(3) Mark is glad that the philosophy classes this year are online.

⇒ i. The philosophy classes this year are online.

⇒ ii. Mark knows/believes that the philosophy classes this year are online.

We are going to focus on the attitudes like the ones above, that is the ones which (i) are expressed by ascriptions with that-clause (i.e., ‘S AVes that p’), and (ii) include a widely construed evaluative (pro or con) component. There are also propositional attitudes that do not include such a component, but involve more than just a belief or denial that a proposition is true; these are, for instance, rogative attitudes such as wondering or wishing to know, etc. Our study does not include them, but they arguably pose similar problems. Finally, there is a class of epistemic verbs that express different degrees of (dis)believing in a proposition, like ‘deny’, ‘doubt’, etc. These are not regarded as non-doxastic on our characterization and will not be the target of our consideration.Footnote 1

2.1 The Problem

Consider the following pair of statements:

These sentences intuitively convey the same information in somewhat different ways. In particular, (4b) sounds like a more explicit version of (4a). Despite the difference in their formulations, they are true in exactly the same circumstances (i.e., if (4a) is true, so must be (4b), and vice versa), setting aside some potential hidden indexicality. Moreover, a competent user of language would easily infer (4b) from (4a) and vice versa. Hence, it is natural to expect that knowing or believing in one of these propositions entails knowing or believing in the other. In other words, the ascriptions like the following ones seem to be equivalent:

Generalising a bit, the evaluation of a doxastic-attitude attribution is not particularly sensitive to the way in which the information from the embedded clause is structured; what matters is rather the mere informational content. However, this does not seem to be true for non-doxastic attitude ascriptions. Consider some ascriptions with non-doxastic attitude verbs:

(6) a. Anne is glad that her father is in cancer remission.

     b. Anne is glad that her father got cancer and (then) entered into remission.

(7) a. John wishes that Anne’s father was in cancer remission.

     b. John wishes that Anne’s father got cancer and (then) entered into remission.

There are circumstances in which (6a) and (7a) are true, while (6b) and (7b) (respectively) sound unacceptable, if not simply false. For instance, assuming that Anne’s father had cancer, Anne is surely glad that her father is now in remission and the cancer has been gone for a while. But, in normal circumstances, Anne would not be glad that her father has experienced the whole thing – i.e., got cancer (was treated etc.) and then entered into remission. Similarly, John may wish for Anne’s father to be in remission. Obviously, however, John does not wish for Anne’s father to be suffering from cancer, even if he is supposed to be close to remission. Let us give one more example:

If Mark likes philosophy classes and definitely prefers face-to-face over online meetings at the same time, (8a) is arguably true. But, in that case, (8b) sounds unacceptable. Still, the embedded clauses in these ascriptions seem to express the same information.Footnote 2

Provided that there are contexts in which a-ascriptions are true while b-ascriptions are not, this means that statements with the same truth conditions (like, e.g., (4a) and (4b)) can generate different truth conditions when embedded in non-doxastic attitude ascriptions. Moreover, if we agree that these statements express the same contents per se, we must agree that they express different contents in attitude embeddings. This fact is problematic for semantic theory which standardly adopts compositionality, i.e., assumes that the semantic content of a complex clause is determined by the semantic contents of its constituents and the mode of their combination. It is worth noting that the indicated problem is more pressing from the viewpoint of semantic theories than the earlier observations that attitude contexts prevent substitutions of coreferring terms in their scope or logically equivalent sentences. The clauses embedded in (1) are not cognitively equivalent and the fact whether one of such ascriptions is true and the other false essentially depends on the epistemic history of the agent. On the other hand, the changes in the meaning of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions yielded by manipulations of information structure do not seem to be related to the agent’s epistemic condition, but directly to the semantics of attitude verbs.

2.2 Previous Experimental Research

The intuition that information structure contributes to the truth condition of a non-doxastic attitude ascription has been confirmed by some empirical research. Rostworowski et al. 2023 have demonstrated that manipulation of the information structure affects the truth-value and acceptability judgements of an attitude ascription. They presented the respondents with short stories that suggested what pro- and con-attitudes the protagonist had and compared folk evaluations of two kinds of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions: one with a simple embedded clause (henceforth ‘straight ascription’) like, for instance, (6a); the other with an embedded conjunction in which the first conjunct was entailed/presupposed by the second one (henceforth ‘conjunctive ascription’) like, for instance, (6b). In the contexts of the presented stories, the straight ascriptions were accepted to a much greater degree than the conjunctive ones. The second study by Rostworowski et al. (2023) established that the difference in evaluations between straight and conjunctive ascriptions persists both in the case in which the first embedded conjunction expresses a presupposition of the second one, and in the case in which it expresses a non-presuppositional entailment of the second conjunct.

However, an important finding was that the conjunctive ascriptions were not unambiguously regarded as unacceptable or false. In fact, people tend to weakly accept them, depending on the background story. This may suggest that in those situations in which a straight ascription is true while the corresponding conjunctive ascription seems false, the latter is not literally false but only unassertable for pragmatic reasons. If this hypothesis is correct, it would mean that the information-structure problem of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions (or at least, the version of the problem considered in this paper) is not a problem for semantic theory.

Our goal in this paper is to settle the above raised issue of whether the difference between straight and conjunctive ascriptions is a genuine semantic difference, involving their meanings and truth conditions, or a merely pragmatic difference relying on different conditions of their assertability. The remainder of this section will focus on the question of what intuitively differentiates the meanings of straight and conjunctive ascriptions (Section 2.3). Our explanation will be roughly that straight ascriptions lack implications which, in turn, are triggered by the conjunctive ascriptions – namely, that the attitude of an agent transfers to the contents of both conjuncts of the conjunction embedded in a conjunctive ascription. We will next consider how this explanation can be formulated in pragmatic terms (Section 2.4).

2.3 (Non) Supportance for (Not All) Entailments

Attitude-verb operators are not generally closed under logical entailments. Yet, it seems that knowledge or belief attributions support some elementary entailments, in particular, the ones that rely on simple analytical relations between the subclauses. For instance, (9) apparently entails (9.i) below:

It would be hard to make sense of (9), provided that we regarded (9.i) as false. The meaning of the phrase ‘has been assassinated’ involves the fact that the person in question is dead, and granted that knowledge that the proposition p is true requires understanding of p, we can conclude that (9) cannot be true without (9.i)’s being true. Generalising a bit, in many cases in which p analytically entails q and this entailment is trivial enough, then believing/knowing that p entails believing/knowing that q.Footnote 3 However, non-doxastic attitudes are sharply different in this respect. A given non-doxastic attitude does not in principle transfer to analytic consequences of the content of a given attitude. This fact has been recognized in the literature. For instance, in defending Russell’s theory of descriptions, Kaplan (2005: 985) says that the fact that Diogenes wished to know whether there existed honest men does not imply that he simply wished to know whether men exist at all.Footnote 4 A similar thing can be said about presuppositions. Linguists have observed that presuppositions tend to escape the scope of attitude verbs and are usually integrated as a part of the agent’s beliefs (e.g., Karttunen 1974; Heim 1992; Geurts 1999; Elbourne 2010).Footnote 5 This is related to a more general phenomenon which is ‘presupposition projection’. Setting details aside, a presupposition of the embedded clause can escape the scope of an attitude verb in a non-doxastic attitude ascription. This entails that someone may have an attitude towards p but not towards something presupposed by p. We can illustrate this by using a previous example. Provided that ‘being in cancer remission’ presupposes that a person got cancer, this presupposition – triggered by the clause embedded in (10) below – is predicted to escape the scope of the attitude verb; consequently, the whole ascription does not entail (10.i):

In sum, non-doxastic attitude verbs do not generally support entailments, whether of presuppositional or non-presuppositional character.

However, conjunctive ascriptions such as (6b), (7b), and (8b) (i.e., the ones with embedded conjunctions) nonetheless seem to invite the conclusion that the agent has the attitude towards two particular pieces of entailment – namely, the ones expressed by the conjuncts themselves. In other words, a sentence of the form, e.g., ‘S is glad that p and q’ implies that S is glad that p and likewise that S is glad that q. So, it seems that although non-doxastic attitude verbs do not support all types of entailments, they support Conjunction Elimination (CE). Before we address potential reservations about this claim, let us note that it yields a neat explanation of how the conjunctive ascriptions differ from the straight ones. Consider example (6), again. The view that CE is supported in the context of attitude ascriptions predicts that (6b) entails that Anne is glad that her father got cancer. But this implication is unacceptable in light of ordinary assumptions, so we intuitively reject (6b) as a statement having an unacceptable implication. On the other hand, (6a) does not imply anything like that, as we have just observed (ex. (10)). To sum up, when S has a non-doxastic attitude A towards q but does not hold A towards p – which is a certain presupposition/analytic entailment of q – we are not ready to accept the statement ‘S holds A towards p and q’, because the latter implies that S has attitude A towards p.Footnote 6

Some objections may be raised against our appeal to CE in the explanation of the problem at issue. Firstly, perhaps we do not need CE in order to demonstrate that straight ascriptions have different meanings from conjunctive ascriptions ones. Observe that they are not equivalent in every context; e.g.:

(11) Anne is sad that her father has been suffering from cancer…

a. She wishes he would go into remission.

b. ?She wishes he would have cancer and (then) go into remission.

The conjunctive ascription (11b) sounds infelicitous as a continuation of (11), in contrast to the straight ascription (11a). So, we do not need to postulate that straight and conjunctive ascriptions have actually different sets of entailments, in particular, that the latter but not the former licences CE. Second, it is disputable whether CE is indeed applicable in attitude contexts. While this rule seems unquestionable with regard to doxastic attitude ascriptions like ‘S believes that p and q’ or ‘S knows that p and q’, it arguably fails in case of negative doxastic attitudes, like ‘doubt’ or ‘deny’; consider:

When it comes to non-doxastic attitude verbs, there is some controversy about CE. For instance, Asher (1987) claims that although verbs like ‘want’ or ‘hope’ seem to support CE in many cases (strictly speaking, the more general inference patterns which he calls ‘simplification’), there exist counterexamples; for instance:

(Asher 1987: 171)

Given that Nicholas does not want to pay for the expensive ticket of flying on the Concorde, he will not decide to take this trip. In that case, the attribution (13.i) seems false. However, the trip on the Concorde seems very attractive to him and he would decide to take this trip if he did not have to pay for it. So, the attribution (13) is arguably true.

In order to defend our explanation that appeals to CE, firstly, we would like to note that the alternative explanation based on the contrast in (11) seems to be implicitly relying on that principle anyway. The source of the problem with (11b) is precisely the first part of the attitude ascription, i.e., Anne wishing that her father would get cancer. Secondly, the presented counterexample to CE in attitude contexts is not fully appealing. Von Fintel (1999: 119–122) argues that examples of this sort rest on an equivocation related to context shifting. Rostworowski (2018: 1324–1325) points out that it sounds incoherent to state (13) but to deny (13.i) in the same discourse. Importantly, our experimental study which will be presented in Section 4 directly addresses this issue and delivers evidence suggesting that the CE-inference in attitude-ascription contexts reflects genuine entailment.

2.4 Pragmatic Account

It is possible to formulate the presented explanation of the problem of information structure in attitude contexts in purely pragmatic terms. The central idea of such an explanation would be that straight ascriptions have the same truth conditions as the (corresponding) conjunctive ascriptions and they are both true in the relevant contexts, but the latter – in contrast to the former – are unassertable in those contexts. For instance, (6a) is true in a situation in which Anne is happy that her father entered remission, but she is not happy that her father got cancer. Yet, (6b) is also literally true in such a case, as Anne is happy because the conjunction becomes true: ‘my father got cancer and went into remission’. The problem, however, is that expressing this fact by the conjunction is very unfortunate as the first conjunct does not express something that Anne is happy about, but only what she takes for granted. So, we get a very misleading interpretation saying that Anne is happy because her father got cancer. For this reason, reporting the attitude of Anne by using the conjunctional form is inappropriate.

Let us call the presented analysis a ‘Pragmatic Account’. The key assumption of the Pragmatic Account is that CE in attitude context would be a sort of pragmatic inference. So, (6b) does not literally entail that Anne is glad that her father got cancer, but only ‘implies’ it in a pragmatic sense. This assumption coincides with the above-considered reservations about CE in the non-doxastic attitude embeddings. The fact that the rule works in some cases while is questionable in others – in particular, it may be suspended given appropriate contextual assumptions – suggests that the associated inference pattern is pragmatic. Of course, the details of the Pragmatic Account need to be worked out. We are not going to elaborate on this, but let us indicate a possible path. It is quite likely that the application of CE in attitude contexts proceeds in a way akin to a derivation of generalised conversational implicatures (see Grice 1975; Levinson 2000). In particular, we may appeal to the Maxims of Manner. A conjunctional form conventionally marks all pieces of information expressed by separate conjuncts, so if the speaker chooses this form, she signalises to the listener that each piece is important in a given respect – in particular, each one is supposed to be new information and not a part of the discourse background or something taken anyway for granted. Now, assuming that this conversational interpretation of conjunction can be performed at a local level – e.g., in the context of a (conjunctive) attitude ascription – the listener can infer that the speaker wants to convey that the contents of both conjuncts are relevant from the viewpoint of the agent’s attitude.Footnote 7 For instance, the listener can infer from (6b) that Anne is glad that her father got cancer, among other things. If that were not the case, the speaker should have used the simpler form (6a), instead. So, an utterance of (6b) conversationally implicates that Anne is glad that her father got cancer.Footnote 8

In sum, conjunctive ascriptions – which contain a conjunction ‘p and q’ as the complement clause – invite the conclusion that the agent has the attitude towards p itself. This conclusion may be false in an appropriate context, even though the agent has the attitude towards q. For this reason, the conjunctive ascription does not sound fully acceptable in the context. In turn, straight ascriptions do not invite such a conclusion, which has to do with the fact that non-doxastic attitude verbs tend to block presuppositions or analytic entailments. Yet, it is disputable whether the CE inference in the context of conjunctive ascriptions reflects a semantic entailment or works for pragmatic reasons. The question whether the application of CE in the contexts of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions has a semantic or pragmatic basis will be the target of our main study (Section 4). The results of the study will decisively testify against the pragmatic solution.