Agenda

Attitudinal and Modal Objects

Friederike Moltmann

(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) based in New York, visiting scholar at Ca' Foscari)

Abstract

In this talk, I outline a new semantics of attitude reports and modal sentences (and sentences in general), based on a novel ontology of attitudinal and modal objects, entities like beliefs, claims, judgments, intentions,requests, promises, obligations, needs, abilities, and possibilities. Modal and Attitudinal objects will be sharply distinguished from propositions as well as events, states, and acts.

Friederike Moltmann is research director at the French Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and in recent years has been visiting researcher at New York University. Her research focuses on the interface between natural language semantics and philosophy (metaphysics, but also philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics), often in relation to generative syntax. One particular interest of hers is natural language ontology, the branch of metaphysics whose subject matter is the ontology implicit in natural language. Friederike Moltmann received a PhD in 1992 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught both linguistics and philosophy at various universities in the US, the UK, France, and Italy. She is author of Parts and Wholes in Semantics (OUP 1997) and Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language (OUP 2013). She is currently working on a book Objects and Attitudes (under contract with OUP), 

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