Abstract

Frege's puzzle about propositional attitude reports is considered. Proposed solution: Every utterance comes from the world model of the speaker, and sometimes it may contain references to (speaker's models of) other world models. More generally, every sentence comes from some kind of world model. It may be the world model of a (real or imagined) person, the world model represented in a novel, movie, scientific book, virtual reality, etc. In principle, even smaller informational units (stories, poems, newspaper articles, jokes, mathematical proofs, video-clips, dreams, halucinations, etc.) may introduce their own “partial world models” – as small additions to “bigger” world models (regarded as background knowledge). Sometimes, sentences contain references to other world models. Trying to understand such sentences, we should identify and keep separated the world models involved.