Objects and Attitudes
Friederike Moltmann
January 2025 

This is a prepublication version of my book Objects and Attitudes, Oxford University Press 2024 (ebook), 2025 (paper) (please cite the published version!). The book develops a novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, reports of saying, and quotation based on the view that sentences semantically act as predicates of various attitudinal and modal objects or satisfiables, entities like claims, requests, promises, obligations, and permissions, rather than standing for abstract propositions playing the role of objects. Modal and attitudinal objects are sharply distinguished ontologically from events, acts, and states. The book presents a wide range of applications of the view to issues in semantics, syntax, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In particular, it gives a new development of truthmaker semantics, as a semantics applied to attitudinal and modal objects ('object-based-truthmaker semantics'). The ontology of satisfiables in fact provides specific novel motivations for truthmaker semantics. For the semantics of reports of saying and quotation the book makes novel use of an 'Austinian' ontology of phatic and locutionary objects, allowing for a new, compositional semantics of quotation.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007950 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Oxford University Press 2024
keywords:	facts, states of affairs, situations, clauses as predicates of content bearers, truthmaker semantics, attitudinal objects, modal objects, attitude reports, modality, speech reports, verbs of saying, quotation, semantics, syntax
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