Representing de re and de dicto belief reports in discourse and narrative

Belief reports can be interpreted de re or de dicto, and we investigate the disambiguation of belief reports as they appear in discourse and narrative. In earlier work, representations for de re and de dicto belief reports were presented, and the distinction between de re and de dicto belief reports was made solely on the basis of their representations. This analysis is sufficient only when belief reports are considered in isolation. We need to consider more complicated belief structures, in addition to those presented earlier, in order to sufficiently represent de re and de dicto belief reports as they appear in discourse and narrative. Further, we cannot meaningfully apply one, but not the other, of the concepts de re and de dicto to these more complicated belief structures. We argue that the concepts de re and de dicto do not apply to an agent's conceptual representation of her beliefs, but that they apply to the utterance of a belief report on a specific occasion. A cognitive agent interprets a belief report such as "S believes that N is F," or "S said, 'N is F'" (where S and N are names or descriptions, and F is an adjective) de dicto if she interprets it from N's perspective, and she interprets it de re if she interprets it from her own perspective.