Author Description

This Chapter Gives A General Description Of The Ontological And Semantic Views Developed In The Book Against The Background Of Standard Views Of Propositional Attitudes And Modals. It Motivates The Ontology Of Modal And Attitudinal Objects Intuitively, Contrasting It With The Familiar Ontology Of Propositions And Events And States. It Presents Well-known Problems For Propositions As Abstract Objects As Well As Scott Soames' And Peter Hanks' Recent Theories Of Cognitive Propositions And Shows How Attitudinal Objects Avoid Those Problems Given Their Mind-dependence And The Fact That They Play A Different Role In The Semantics Of Attitude Reports Than As Arguments Of Attitudinal Relations. It Points Out Convergences Of The Semantics Of Based On Modal Objects To Recent 'localized' Approaches To Modals. It Critically Discusses Recent Semantic Analyses That Take Clausal Complements To Be Predicates Of The Davidsonian Event Argument Of Attitude Verbs