“Ought” and intensionality

Abstract

The syntactic structure of the deontic “ought” has been much debated in philosophy and linguistics. Schroeder argues that the deontic “ought” is syntactically ambiguous in the sense that it can be associated with either a control or raising construction. He distinguishes between deliberative and evaluative “ought”s and argues that the deliberative “ought” is control while the evaluative “ought” is raising. However, if there is a control sense of “ought,” it implies that there is a sense of “ought” in which the word carries an external argument. Chrisman (Australas J Philos 90(3):433–451, 2012) proposes two linguistic tests (i.e. “er”-nominalization and passivization) to verify this prediction. I add a new test, which I call the intensionality test, to the list.