Abstract

Impersonating someone and reasoning on his or her behalf are current practices in everyday life. It requires the ability to perform representation, simulation, and metarepresentation. An illuminating description of these cognitive and linguistic operations has been given recently in terms of projection, assumption, and retrojection. The present essay aims at supplementing that description with a formal treatment that shows how informal inferences involving reported beliefs can be validated. The last two sections of the paper show the logical links that tie together the inferences based on “believing that” or “knowing that” to the inferences based on “knowing what” and “knowing how.”