"This chapter gives a general description of the ontological and semantic views developed in the book against the background of standard views of propositional attitudes and modals. It motivates the ontology of modal and attitudinal objects intuitively, contrasting it with the familiar ontology of propositions and events and states. It presents well-known problems for propositions as abstract objects as well as Scott Soames' and Peter Hanks' recent theories of cognitive propositions and shows how attitudinal objects avoid those problems given their mind-dependence and the fact that they play a different role in the semantics of attitude reports than as arguments of attitudinal relations. It points out convergences of the semantics of based on modal objects to recent 'localized' approaches to modals. It critically discusses recent semantic analyses that take clausal complements to be predicates of the Davidsonian event argument of attitude verbs"--
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.
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.
