A Basic Intensional Language

Abstract

My principal concern in this book will be to develop tests for discerning what it is that natural language quantifies over. In particular I will be examining quantification over abstract entities, and, even more specifically, quantification over intensional entities — those entities which are involved in our modal talk, our talk about what might have been, or about what would have happened if things had been different. If what your language quantifies over reveals your ontology, then I will be trying to reveal the ontology of natural language — I will be doing what Emmon Bach calls natural language metaphysics. One of the conclusions I shall be coming to is that natural language has a prodigal ontological commitment. That may well be why lovers of desert landscapes eschew it for a more austere canonical idiom. At face value this is not surprising.