Intensional Transitive Verbs Research Articles

Perceptual consciousness and intensional transitive verbs

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 consciousness—for instance, hallucinations—there is nothing of which we are conscious. This paper resolves this inconsistency—which we call the presentation problem—by (a) arguing that ‘conscious of’ 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 ‘conscious of’, but also as a proposal about the metaphysics of conscious states.

Two notions of resemblance and the semantics of ‘what it's like’

ABSTRACT According to the resemblance account of ‘what it's like’ and similar constructions, a sentence such as ‘there is something it's 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.

Experiential Attitudes are Propositional

Attitudinal propositionalism is the view that all mental attitude content is truth-evaluable. While attitudinal propositionalism is still silently assumed in large parts of analytic philosophy, recent work on objectual attitudes (i.e. attitudes like ‘fearing Moriarty’ and ‘imagining a unicorn’ that are reported through intensional transitive verbs with a direct object) has put attitudinal propositionalism under explanatory pressure. This paper defends propositionalism for a special subclass of objectual attitudes, viz. experiential attitudes. The latter are attitudes like seeing, remembering, and imagining whose grammatical objects intuitively denote (events or) scenes. I provide a propositional analysis of experiential attitudes that preserves the merits of propositionalism. This analysis uses the possibility of representing the target-scenes of experiential attitudes by the intersection of all propositions that are true in these scenes. I show that this analysis makes available the usual (Russellian) account of intensionality and the common (Boolean) logic for entailments.

Truthmaker semantics for natural language: Attitude verbs, modals, and intensional transitive verbs

AbstractThis paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. The semantics is applied to factive verbs and response-stance verbs as well as to cases of modal concord. The paper also presents new motivations for ‘object-based truthmaker semantics’ from intensional transitive verbs such asneed, look for, own, andbuyand gives an outline of their semantics based on a further development of truthmaker semantics.

An Empirical Solution to the Puzzle of Macbeth’s Dagger

In this paper I present an empirical solution to the puzzle of Macbeth’s dagger. The puzzle of Macbeth’s dagger is the question of whether, in having his fatal vision of a dagger, Macbeth sees a dagger. I answer this question by addressing a more general one: the question of whether perceptual verbs are intensional transitive verbs (ITVs). I present seven experiments, each of which tests a collection of perceptual verbs for one of the three features characteristic of ITVs. One of these features is Nonexistence: the failure of sentences involving transitive verbs to entail the existence of their direct objects. The experiments reveal that with respect to all three of these features, “see” behaves much more like a paradigmatically extensional verb than an intensional one. But surprisingly, unlike “see”, “perceive” behaves much more like a paradigmatically intensional verb. This shows that the category of perceptual verbs is not uniform with respect to the features of intensionality; while Macbeth does not see a dagger, he may still perceive one.

Intensionality, Reference and Games of Partial Information I. Intensional Transitive Verbs

In this paper I focus on the linguistic constructions in which intensional transitive verbs (ITVs) occur. In order to present the complex semantic profile of the ITVs, I contrast them with the extensional transitive verbs and I inspect the semantic differences of their inferential behaviour with respect to the existential entailment, to the substitution salva veritate of the coreferential terms and to the semantic specificity. Insofar as the sentences containing ITVs are structurally ambiguous between an intensional, de dicto interpretation, and an extensional, de re interpretation, they threaten the coordination between agents. For this reason, if the speaker uses an ITV in one way and the hearer’s reading of it diverges from the speaker’s intended meaning, both agents have a coordination problem. In this regard, using the mathematical framework of games of partial information, I show what conditions have to be satisfied in order for a rational speaker and a rational hearer to efficiently communicate with a sentence in which an ITV occurs and to converge on the right interpretation of the intensional verb construction, when the sentence’s surface syntax is probabilistically silent about which of the de re or de dicto meaning the hearer has to choose in order to coordinate with the speaker. This is the first part of a two-part study.

Semantic Verbs Are Intensional Transitives

In this paper I show that we have strong empirical and theoretical reasons to treat the verbs we use in our semantic theorizing—particularly ‘refers (to)’, ‘applies (to)’, and ‘is true (of)’—as intensional transitive verbs (ITVs). Stating our semantic theories with intensional vocabulary allows us to partially reconcile two competing approaches to the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian approach, on which semantics is non-relational, internalistic, and concerns the psychology of language users, and the Lewisian approach, on which semantics is fully relational, specifies truth-conditions, and has metaphysical implications. ITVs have two readings: an intensional, de dicto reading, and a relational, de re reading. A semantic theory stated with the de dicto readings of our semantic verbs captures the core insights of the Chomskian approach to semantics, in part because it allows us to assign extremely fine-grained semantic values to expressions, even when those expressions are empty. On the other hand, the de re reading yields a theory that is fully relational, and issues in truth-conditions. The resulting theories are related—and compatible—in that they are expressed by two different readings of the very same semantic vocabulary, and plausibly, the distinction between these two readings is one of scope.

Proof-Theoretic Semantics for Intensional Transitive Verbs

The article presents a proof-theoretic semantics for intensional transitive verbs (ITVs), with the following three characteristics: (i) non-specific interpretation of indefinite objects; (ii) resistance to substitution of coextensive objects; and (iii) no existential commitment. The article also shows how to handle monotonicity reasoning for ITVs. A central advantage of the approach is the absence to any ontological commitment characteristic of model-theoretic semantics, where there is no consensus about what populates models. Finally, the article discusses passivization of ITVs.

Intensionality and variable objects

This article examines Moltmann�s analysis of intensional transitive verbs (e.g. need, search for), and argues that the analysis fails because the key notion it employs, �variable satisfier�, is inconsistent.

A Constructive Type-Theoretical Formalism for the Interpretation of Subatomically Sensitive Natural Language Constructions

The analysis of atomic sentences and their subatomic components poses a special problem for proof-theoretic approaches to natural language semantics, as it is far from clear how their semantics could be explained by means of proofs rather than denotations. The paper develops a proof-theoretic semantics for a fragment of English within a type-theoretical formalism that combines subatomic systems for natural deduction [20] with constructive (or Martin-Lof) type theory [8, 9] by stating rules for the formation, introduction, elimination and equality of atomic propositions understood as types (or sets) of subatomic proof-objects. The formalism is extended with dependent types to admit an interpretation of non-atomic sentences. The paper concludes with applications to natural language including internally nested proper names, anaphoric pronouns, simple identity sentences, and intensional transitive verbs.

Intensional verbs in event semantics

In Attitude Problems, I gave an account of opacity in the complement of intensional transitive verbs that combined neo-Davidsonian event-semantics with a hidden-indexical account of substitution failure. In this paper, I extend the account to clausal verbs.

SENTENTIALISM AND BERKELEY'S MASTER ARGUMENT

Sententialism is the view that intensional positions in natural languages occur within clausal complements only. According to proponents of this view, intensional transitive verbs such as ‘want’, ‘seek’ or ‘resemble’ are actually propositional attitude verbs in disguise. I argue that ‘conceive’ (and a few other verbs) cannot fit this mould: conceiving‐of is not reducible to conceiving‐that. I offer a new diagnosis of where Berkeley's ‘master argument’ goes astray, analysing what is odd about saying that Hylas conceives a tree which is not conceived. A sententialist semantics cannot account for the absurdity in attitude ascriptions of this type: we need to acknowledge irreducibly non‐propositional (but none the less de dicto) conceiving.

NP-Interpretation and the Structure of Predicates

Two classes of intensional transitive verbs affect the interpretation of an indefinite object in the same way that stage- and individual-level predicates affect an indefinite subject. The contrast for objects is instantiated inside the scope of intensionality, that is, VP-internally. I claim that the differentiation of subject positions said to underlie the interpretational contrast for subjects recurs in the VP for objects, inside the domain of intensionality. The internal domain of a transitive verb is therefore somewhat syntactically articulated, containing at least two positions for indefinite objects. Quantified objects, however, are VP-external.