From needing to wanting

Abstract This paper explores the concepts of needing and wanting, and their relevance for communication from an evolutionary perspective. The main claim is that volition is rooted in the set of needs that determine an individual’s condition. It will be shown how needs and volition shape the architecture of speech acts, providing new support for Gricean intentionalism, according to which each major speech act is driven by a communicative intention. In addition, the paper investigates how these concepts are mapped onto natural-language expressions with intensional semantics and argues that the resulting ‘need’-predicates and volitional predicates differ in their argument structure: whereas ‘need’-predicates are analyzed as three-place predicates introducing an extra slot for a goal -argument, volitional predicates are analyzed as two-place predicates. Finally, it is assumed that all semantic flavors of deontic modality can be derived from volitional modality.