Deference and Semantics of Belief Reports I: Deferential Beliefs

Agents often have mental representations involving notions and ideas which are acquired by deferential appeal to epistemic authorities and which the agents cannot interpret. One of the questions I will answer in this paper is whether these mental representations in which deferential items are involved constitute beliefs the agents have. To this question my answer will be affirmative, pace Sperber, who considers these representations to be semantically undetermined. In this sense, following Recanati, I will consider that deferential beliefs, while epistemically undetermined, are determined from a semantic point of view. This is the first part of a two-part paper.