The Semantics of Intensional Transitive Verbs in Towards Non-Being∗

In this paper, I point out the problems of the semantics of intensional transitive verbs (e.g.,“seek,” “worship,” and “imagine”) proposed by Graham Priest in his book Towards Non-Being (TNB). On the basis of noneism, a version of Meinongian theory of nonexistent objects, TNB basically takes an intensional transitive as representing a relation between an ordinary individual object and a (possibly) nonexistent one; for example, in the sentence “Homer worshiped Zeus,” the verb “worship” represents a first-order relation that holds between Homer and Zeus, which is a nonexistent object. However, TNB’s semantics also involves some complications. In particular, to accommodate several puzzling cases, including those of “existence-entailing” predicates and of “indeterminate” readings of intensional transitives, Priest incorporates intentional operators, which represent propositional attitudes, into the semantic analysis of intensional transitives. The purpose of this paper is to show that these additional complications, together with TNB’s semantics for intentional operators, conflict with certain inferential behaviors of intensional transitive verbs. Further I argue that these inferential behaviors and the fact that the complications in TNB make it difficult to explain them indicate the difficulty of analyzing intensional transitives by means of propositional attitudes, and tell in favor of a simple analysis that does not appeal to propositional attitudes. A Meinongian way of developing such an analysis is briefly considered in this paper. Focusing on the verb “seek”, this paper gives an analysis which appeals to the distinction between complete and incomplete objects and the distinction between two kinds of seeking activities.