Conclusion

Abstract

After a book as long as this, conclusions should be short and sweet. This one is at leat short. The goal of this study was to examine the panoply of abstract entities in natural language metaphysics, isolate some linguistically interesting problems about the sematics and anaphoric properties of expressions referring to them, offer solutions to there problems and draw some philosophical conclusions about real and natural language metaphysics. I have done these things. I hope to have had something of interest to say to formal semanticists, computational linguists, and and philosophers. For the formal semanticists, I have uncovered some interesting problems in the semantics of abstract nominals and abstract entity anaphora. I have given possible, and perhaps interesting, solutions to many of these problems. If the approach in this book is at all on the right track, then formal semantics in undergoing a sea-change: in the face of diverse problems like belief report interpretation and thd analysis of abstract entity anaphora, we have to move away from a static conception of semantics solely in terms of the intensional structures of standard possible worlds semantics to a dynamic conceptions that exploits not only intensions but also algebraic ans representational structures that, like SDRSs, may be only remotely connected to truth conditions as traditionally understood. Although these lessons might be implicit in DRT from the beginning, this book develops and exploits them in a systematic manner far beyond any other DRT treatment.