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<Paper uid="J93-4003">
  <Title>Indexical Expressions in the Scope of Attitude Verbs</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="647" end_page="648" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5. Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We are given a belief report: &amp;quot;Mary believes that P.&amp;quot; We have a parser and semantic interpreter that can identify the proposition expressed by P. We want to use this information to predict Mary's behavior--say, her answer to a given question. Suppose we know the algorithm that Mary uses for answering questions. Since the algorithm's input is a set of representations, we need to find Mary's internal representation for the proposition expressed by the clause P.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> If the proposition expressed by a clause is a sentence of a representation language, our problem is already solved: Mary's representation of the proposition just is the proposition. Unfortunately, we have seen that this kind of theory cannot explain opaque indexicals. It seems that Mary's representation must be distinct from the proposition it represents, and if we are given the proposition it will take some reasoning to find the representation. If we are going to distinguish between a proposition and its internal representation, we would like a clear and simple picture of how they are related, and how we are to find the representation when the proposition is known.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We have proposed that the proposition expressed by P is a pair, containing a wff and an assignment of values to the free variables of the wff. To find Mary's representation we must find the terms she uses to represent the values of the free variables, and substitute these terms for the corresponding variables in the wff. In Crimmins and Perry's work, a proposition and its representation are two quite different objects. A proposition consists of objects and relations, while a representation consists of &amp;quot;ideas&amp;quot;  Andrew R. Haas Indexical Expressions in the Scope of Attitude Verbs and &amp;quot;notions.&amp;quot; If we need both internal representations and singular propositions, it is simpler to assume that they are closely similar objects--instead of radically different objects, as in Crimmins and Perry.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The examples that motivate this work are unfortunately remote from the texts that computational linguists currently work on. In studying opacity we concentrate on cases where an agent uses two different representations without realizing that they refer to the same entity. Such cases are popular in fiction, but rare in applications like machine translation or question-answering from a database. So it will be some time before these ideas are helpful in the practice of computational linguistics. However, indexicals occur constantly in human speech, and opacity is a crucial issue in any theory of propositional attitudes. So if we are serious about a sentential theory of attitudes, it is important to be certain that such a theory can explain opaque indexicals.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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