On the performance of modal objects

Abstract

Friederike Moltmann’s target paper on object-based truthmaker semantics (in the following TSNL) offers a concise and well-written summary of the framework’s main ideas and merits specifically for the analysis of natural language modality and attitude ascriptions. In the following, I focus on select aspects of her proposal for deontic and teleological modality as well as imperative clauses, taking into account also their behavior under disjunctions. By introducing special modal and attitudinal objects, the framework closes a gap in standard models for natural language, which are hard-pressed to come up with suitable meanings for intuitively ‘modal’ nouns like obligation, permission, need, belief, report and the like. Notably, providing interpretations for nouns of this sort, taking into account speaker intuitions, philosophical insights, and the nouns’ semantic and syntactic relations to other expressions of the language, leads to new semantic accounts for better studied expressions like modal verbs, illocutionary predicates, or imperative clauses. In some sense, the approach could be seen as a more radical push in the direction of where Kratzer’s standard work on modals has taken us. While accessibility relations and valuation (i.e., what is true at individual worlds) are independent in classical modal logic, for Kratzer, accessibility is derived from non-modal properties of the individual worlds (the actual content of some relevant body of beliefs, laws, rules, desires, etc.). For Moltmann, modal meanings are grounded in the existence of suitable, largely abstract objects. The ontology is enriched with objects corresponding to illocutionary acts, illocutionary products, cognitive acts, cognitive products, modal states and modal products. The resulting inventory can be used to address various problems associated with modality and attitude expressions, for instance the distinction between weak and strong (or ‘heavy’ and ‘light’) permission, a longstanding issue for classical deontic logic. Classical deontic logic and the standard Kratzerian treatment that builds on it, analyze deontic possibility as compatibility with the deontically optimal worlds (among the ones verifying the relevant circumstances). This falls short of capturing the inuitive difference between (1a), which can indeed convey the notion of compatibility, and (1b), which ascribes to Mary something more like a right or an entitlement, which, for instance, the relevant authority has to revoke explicitly and cannot simply overwrite by imposing a conflicting obligation.