Oxford University Press 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.