29 research outputs found
Attitudinal Objects
This paper defends the view that attitudinal objects such as claims, beliefs, judgments, and requests form an ontological category of its own sharply distinguished from that of events and states and that of propositions. Attitudinal objects play a central role in attitude reports and avoid the conceptual and empirical problems for propositions. Unlike the latter, attitudinal objects bear a particular connection to normativity. The paper will also discuss the syntactic basis of a semantics of attitude reports based on attitudinal objects
Natural Language Ontology
The aim of natural language ontology is to uncover the ontological categories and structures that are implicit in the use of natural language, that is, that a speaker accepts when using a language. This article aims to clarify what exactly the subject matter of natural language ontology is, what sorts of linguistic data it should take into account, how natural language ontology relates to other branches of metaphysics, in what ways natural language ontology is important, and what may be distinctive of the ontological categories and structures reflected in natural language
Attitude Reports, Cognitive Products, and Attitudinal Objects: A Response to G. Felappi On ProductâBased Accounts of Attitudes
This note gives a brief presentation of my recently developed attitudinal-objects semantics of attitude reports, in order to show that Felappi's (2014) arguments against it are flawed or fail to apply and to point out that her alternative suggestions have already been discussed and rejected in the work she criticizes
Attitudinal Objects: their Ontology and Importance for Philosophy and Natural Language Semantics
This paper argues for the philosophical and semantic importance of attitudinal objects, entities such as judgments, claims, beliefs, demands, and desires, as an ontological category distinct from that of events and states and from that of propositions. The paper presents significant revisions and refinements of the notion of an attitudinal object as it was developed in my previous work
Truth Predicates, Truth Bearers, and their Variants
This paper argues that truth predicates in natural language and their variants, predicates of correctness, satisfaction and validity, do not apply to propositions (not even with 'that'-clauses), but rather to a range of attitudinal and modal objects. As such natural language reflects a notion of truth that is primarily a normative notion of correctness constitutive of representational objects. The paper moreover argues that 'true' is part of a larger class of satisfaction predicates whose semantic differences are best accounted for in terms of a truthmaker theory along the lines of Fine's recent truthmaker semantics
Names, light nouns, and countability
Making use of Kayne's (2005, 2010) theory of light nouns, this paper argues that light nouns are part of (simple) names and that a mass-count distinction among light nouns explains the behavior of certain types of names in German as mass rather than count. The paper elaborates the role of light nouns with new generalizations regarding their linguistic behavior in quantificational and pronominal NPs, their selection of relative pronouns in German, and a general difference in the support of plural anaphora between English and German
Two Notions of Resemblance and the Semantics of 'What it's Like'
According to the resemblance account of 'what it's like' and similar constructions,
a sentence such as 'there is something itâs like to have a toothache' means 'there is
something having a toothache resembles'. This account has proved controversial in
the literature; some writers endorse it, many reject it. We show that this conflict is
illusory. Drawing on the semantics of intensional transitive verbs, we show that there
are two versions of the resemblance account, depending on whether 'resembles' is
construed notionally or relationally. While well-known criticisms of the resemblance
account undermine its relational version, they do not touch its notional version. On
the contrary, the notional version is equivalent to various accounts usually interpreted
as rivals to resemblance. We end by noting that this resolution of the controversy (a)
explains why 'like', which is a comparative, appears in a construction that concerns the
properties of events, and (b) removes any pressure to suppose that 'like' is ambiguous
between a comparative and a non-comparative sense
Perceptual consciousness and intensional transitive verbs
Funding: Australian Research Council (DP170104295).There is good reason to think that, in every case of perceptual consciousness, there is something of which we are conscious; but there is also good reason to think that, in some cases of perceptual consciousnessâfor instance, hallucinationsâthere is nothing of which we are conscious. This paper resolves this inconsistencyâwhich we call the presentation problemâby (a) arguing that âconscious ofâ and related expressions function as intensional transitive verbs and (b) defending a particular semantic approach to such verbs, on which they have readings that lack direct objects or themes. The paper further argues that this approach serves not only as a linguistic proposal about the semantics of âconscious ofâ, but also as a proposal about the metaphysics of conscious states.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Cognitive Products and the Semantics of Attitude Verbs and Deontic Modals
This paper outlines a semantic account of attitude reports and deontic modals based on cognitive and illocutionary products, mental states, and modal products, as opposed to the notion of an abstract proposition or a cognitive act