Attributivists

Attributivists is a label used in some strands of philosophy to refer to proponents of attributivism, a family of views about how properties and predicates are ascribed to objects, events, or agents. In broad terms, attributivists analyze sentences about properties as instances of attributive predication, where the central task is to encode which properties are attributed to which subjects under given linguistic and contextual conditions. This contrasts with views that treat property talk as primarily intrinsic or essential to the subjects themselves.

Across different discussions, attributivism can be applied to semantics of adjectives, to the ontology of properties, and to moral discourse. In semantics, attributivists emphasize the role of language and context in determining the content of attribute statements. In ethics or metaethics, the label is sometimes used to summarize positions that view moral properties ascribed to agents by discourse rather than as intrinsic features of actions.

Because the term is used variably, there is no single canonical account of attributivism. Debates focus on how attributive statements relate to truth conditions, how they interact with normative or evaluative content, and whether attributive analysis can capture natural-language phenomena like gradability, modality, or attribution of reasons.

Related ideas include theories of property ascriptions, attribution theory in philosophy of language, and debates between essentialists and anti-essentialists. The term Attributivists thus signals a family of approaches rather than a single doctrine.