Attribution of de re propositional attitudes as a means of persuasion

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 attitude’s object which she knows to be unavailable to the attitude holder. As the existence of rhetorical de re is revealed, it gives rise to two questions that will be the primary concern of the present paper. (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 ploy designed to, or naturally predisposed to, mislead the addressee? This paper argues that the first question can be answered positively but the second one should receive a negative answer. We show that the question of whether a certain instance of rhetorical de re is a ploy or act of manipulation should be answered depending not on whether the statement is clearly false for the speaker but on whether it is clearly unacceptable for the speaker. In case the speaker herself considers the argument made by means of the statement acceptable, there is no reason to de­nounce such a communicative act as a ploy or manipulation irrespective of which model-theoretic truth-value the statement has. There are therefore reasons to incorporate rhetorical considerations into the modelling of how attitude reports are interpreted, in addition to con­siderations of truth and epistemological aspects, championed by Frege.