Scopal and non-scopal modifiers

I tried to post this yesterday but the site went down again… I’ll put it anyway, but I think T.J. and Guy have already covered many of the same points.


Back to your original example, The dog probably barked., imagine it as an answer to these questions:

  1. The trick-or-treaters ran away without their candy. What happened?
    (probably scopes over the)
  2. Do you think the dog barked or begged at the trick-or-treaters?
    (the scopes over probably)

As for intersective adjectives, in my dissertation (Section 5.3.3, ~p74) I gave the following non-scopal adjective classes and examples:

  • intersective: white cat
  • subsective: cognitive scientist
  • intensional: fake gun

Also this paper by Ulrich Reichard looks nice: https://philpapers.org/archive/REIIAG.pdf

I just skimmed it but it has some examples with set descriptions of the phenomena. Note that what I called “intensional” Reichard calls “non-subsective”, and also discusses another term, “privative”. It doesn’t seem to cover scopal adjectives, though.