The two classes of attitude verbs do show important differences with respect to their diverse complementation behavior, for example, mood choice and temporal orientation of their complement clauses.
However, this uniform treatment has been argued in recent work on attitudes to fail to predict any major linguistic differences between classes of attitude verbs, say, attitudes of belief and attitudes of desire (e.g., Farkas 1992; Moltmann 2003; Laca 2013; Anand and Hacquard 2013).
Moreover, Brady argues that we can distinguish active from passive evaluative attributes, where the former class of attitudes involve pursuit of the good in question.
Cognitive or not, intentions belong to the broad class of attitudes that are sensitive to judgments, and this may account for the capacity of practical reflection to generate new intentions (Scanlon 1998, chap. 1).
(I will be thinking here of the justification, explanation and deliberation of actions though much of what follows plausibly generalizes to a wide range of what Scanlon (1998) calls judgement-sensitive attitudes: "[t]he class of attitudes for which reasons… can sensibly be asked for or offered" (1998, 4 5).
In general, these studies have examined a large class of attitudes, where by "attitude" is meant "evaluative feelings of pro or con, favorable or unfavorable, with regard to particular objects"; the objects may be "concrete representations of things or actions, or abstract concepts" (Insko and Schopler 1967: 361 362).
They distinguish the former class of attitude verbs from the latter in terms of their licensing behavior of epistemic modals.
However, if we consider these three types of attitudes from another angle, viz. the interaction between the embedding attitude verbs and the embedded epistemic modals, we may ask whether a fourth typological possibility exists, as Table 1 shows: could there be a fourth class of attitude verbs, which allows epistemic necessity but not possibility modals in their complement clauses?
In a speech to the Sutton Trust in central London earlier today, Mr Clegg said: "Too often, the question of class and class attitudes is left in the shadows of the social mobility debate.
But for current purposes the class of propositional attitudes will suffice as a criterion for the mental.
