Making claims, decisions, and other things

Abstract

This paper analyzes complex attitude predicates such as make the claim that S. The proposal is couched in the the idea that propositional attitudes are built from content-bearing individuals (e.g. Moulton 2009; Moltmann 2020). I argue that the singular definite in this construction refers to a definite kind in the sense of Dayal 2004, specifying the type of result rather than the result itself. This immediately explains a range of phenomena including non-anaphoricity, no instantiation in negative contexts, and apparent non-uniqueness in quantified contexts. A compositional analysis is developed, building up from the individual parts, in which this constructions takes a definite kind argument and denotes the creation of its instances.