Objects and Attitudes

Objects and Attitudes develops a radically novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, and quotation based on an ontology of attitudinal, modal, and phatic objects, entities such as claims, thoughts, intentions, desires, requests, utterances, as well as needs, obligations, permissions, offers, and abilities. It systematically pursues a methodology of descriptive metaphysics--specifically, natural language ontology--and argues that natural language reflects an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects rather than an ontology of abstract propositions. The book gives a new development of truthmaker semantics ("object-based truthmaker semantics"), for which attitudinal and modal objects provide specific support. The semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences and quotation pursues the emerging view that clausal complements do not generally act as proposition-referring terms but rather as predicates of the (content-bearing) object described by the embedding predicate. It also develops novel, truthmaker-based conceptions of facts and states of affairs, the referents of clauses on a secondary, nominal function. Objects and Attitudes pursues the syntactic view that attitude verbs are underlying complex predicates, consisting of a light verb and a noun for an attitudinal object. Within that view, it gives a new syntactic and semantic analysis of special quantifiers (something, several things) as complements of attitude verbs and verbs of saying, on which such quantifiers range over attitudinal or phatic objects.

Friederike Moltmann is currently Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice, France. She has widely published both in philosophy and in linguistics and is author of Parts and Wholes in Semantics (OUP 1997) and Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language (OUP 2013).

Acknowledgments and Sources Preface
Chapter 1: Problems for Propositions and Issues for the Semantics of Modals: A New Approach to the Semantics of Attitude Reports and Modal Sentences Chapter 2: The Ontology of Modal and Attitudinal Objects Chapter 3: Object-based Truthmaker Semantics, Norms of Truth, and Direction of Fit Chapter 4: Object-Based Truthmaker Semantics for Modals Chapter 5: The Syntax and Semantics of Attitude Reports Chapter 6: Levels of Linguistic Acts and the Semantics of Saying and Quoting Chapter 7: Clauses in Functions other than as Predicates of Attitudinal Objects Chapter 8: Conclusions and Further Avenues of Development
References Index