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.

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