Nominalizing Quantifiers

Friederike Moltmann (1)

1 IHPST - Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques

Quantified expressions in natural language generally are taken to act like quantifiers in logic, which either range over entities that need to satisfy or not satisfy the predicate in order for the sentence to be true or otherwise are substitutional quantifiers. I will argue that there is a philosophically rather important class of quantified expressions in English that act quite differently, a class that includes something, nothing, and several things. In addition to expressing quantification, such expressions act like nominalizations, introducing a new domain of objects that would not have been present in the semantic structure of the sentence otherwise. The entities those expressions introduce are of just the same sort as those that certain ordinary nominalizations refer to (such as John's wisdom or John's belief that S), namely they are tropes or entities related to tropes. Analysing certain quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers will shed a new light on philosophical issues such as the status of properties and the nature of propositional attitudes.

Mots clés: nominalism; nominalizations; ontology; properties; propositional attitudes; quantification; quantifiers in natural language; tropes

Domaines: Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Friederike Moltmann. Nominalizing Quantifiers. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2003, 32 (5), pp.445-481. ⟨halshs-00791954⟩