The question whether natural language permits quantification over intentional objects as the ‘nonexistent’ objects of thought is the topic of a major philosophical controversy, as is the status of intentional objects as such. This paper will argue that natural language does reflect a particular notion of intentional object and in particular that certain types of natural language constructions (generally disregarded in the philosophical literature) cannot be analysed without positing intentional objects. At the same time, those intentional objects do not come (...) for free; rather they are strictly dependent on intentional acts that generally need to have a presence, in one way or another, in the semantic structure of the sentence. (shrink)

Languages involving modalities and languages involving vagueness have each been thoroughly studied. On the other hand, virtually nothing has been said about the interaction of modality and vagueness. This paper aims to start filling that gap. Section 1 is a discussion of various possible sources of vague modality. Section 2 puts forward a model theory for a quantified language with operators for modality and vagueness. The model theory is followed by a discussion of the resulting logic. In Section 3, the (...) framework will permit us to address a puzzle raised by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams. (shrink)

This is my entry on natural language ontology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The paper is a reply to Bassi and Rasin ( 2018 ) on the treatment of sentences like [_The gifted mathematician that you claim to be_] _should have solved this task without problems_ by Grosu and Krifka ( 2007 ), which was published in _Linguistics and Philosophy_. Grosu and Krifka provide an analysis of the _de dicto_ interpretation in which the bracketed expression refers to an individual concept. Bassi and Rasin question this because equivalent expressions in Hebrew, in which the (...) gap is rendered by a resumptive pronoun, do not exhibit the _de dicto_ interpretation, but only the _de re_ interpretation. We provide independent evidence that person-marked pronouns in post-copular position are incompatible with antecedents that denote individual concepts, thus explaining Bassi and Rasin’s observation within Grosu and Krifka’s framework. We furthermore point out two new problems for the analysis of Bassi and Rasin presented in the body of their article, which does not make use of individual concepts or of some alternative mechanism that can deal with substitutivity in opaque contexts. We also note that an alternative analysis they present in an appendix amounts to a notational variant of ours. (shrink)