Overview

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.

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9780190878481

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Reviews

Friederike Moltmann's Objects and Attitudes is a highly original work, presenting the results of over a decade of research at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. It represents an important contribution to contemporary work on content and the ongoing hyperintensional revolution in semantics. Moltmann develops Kit Fine's truthmaker semanticsim in novel ways to provide fine-grained notions of content for satisfiables, like beliefs and desires. It is a challenging and highly rewarding read. * Mark Jago, University of Nottingham * This book purses a bold idea: that both root and embedded sentences are not what we thought. Instead of, say, abstract propositions, it argues that sentences are predicates of things—objects like claims and obligations. The implications for semantics and natural language ontology are clear. Friederike Moltmann is one of very few scholars who can engage with the philosophy of language and generative syntax in one breath. * Keir Moulton, University of Toronto * For all their familiarity, things like claims, needs, conjectures, and possibilities^ DDL'satisfiables,' Friederike Moltmann calls them—have not been accorded much theoretical respect. That changes now. Moltmann builds a semantics around them but with a crucial twist: Satisfiables have satisfiers, which puts the whole apparatus of truthmaker semantics at her disposal. Once froth on the waves, they become in Moltmann the wavemakers * Stephen Yablo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology *

Author Information

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).

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