Attribution of de re Propositional Attitudes as a Means of Persuasion

Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 2025. Vol. 95. No. 1. P. 26–33.

D.B. Tiskin, Frolov K.

Translator: B. Alekseev

By de re propositional attitude ascription for rhetorical purposes we will understand uttering a modal statement wherein the speaker deliberately uses a description of the object of an attitude that is knowingly unavailable for the attitude holder. As the existence of the de re rhetorical statement class is revealed, it gives rise to two questions, which will be the primary concern of this study. (1) Using a rhetorical de re ascription, does the speaker utter something false in the model-theoretic sense? (2) Would it be justified to classify rhetorical “de re” as a rhetorical trick designed or naturally predisposed to mislead the addressee? It is stated and proved that the first question can be answered in the affirmative, while the latter should be answered in the negative. We show that the question whether a certain rhetorical de re instance is a trick or act of manipulation should be answered depending not on whether the statement is knowingly false for the speaker but on whether it is knowingly unacceptable for the speaker. In case the speaker himself considers his argument acceptable, there is no reason to denounce such a communicative act as a trick or manipulation irrespective of which model-theoretic truth-value the statement has. There are therefore reasons to incorporate rhetorical considerations into the modeling of how attitude statements are interpreted, in addition to considerations of truth and epistemological aspects, going back to G. Frege.

Keywords: semantics, truth, acceptability, propositional attitudes, intensional contexts, practical reasoning