I agree that I find the book not to be on the table is less 'something' than I find him not to be rude, but I don't consider that 'something' to be anything to do with grammar. As someone who has an academic interest/background in logic and semantics, I'm always thinking about meaning and how it applies to use, and I'm not usually particularly interested in grammar, which for me is just about syntactical and morphological rules.
1) I find him to be rude.
We're talking here about a subjective judgement/impression/opinion, whatever you want to call it. We all agree this is a common use of this particular structure.
2) I find the book to be on the table.
To me, this is obviously quite different, and I don't think it's about 'judgement of the accuracy of a purported location' as you say, Phlebas. So does that count for me as a different meaning? A different use? I think so. And I don't think it's really about locative adverbials in an essential way.
There was a thread earlier today with a sentence something like:
3) He came home to find his wife dead.
This is obviously not similar in use to sentence 1. Can we say that sentences 2 and 3 are both about 'discovery of a state-of-affairs', whereas sentence 1 is about 'personal impression'? I think we can, despite the predicates 'rude' and 'dead' both being adjective phrases. Isn't it therefore about meaning rather than structure? If the structure is the same, where does the difference lie? In the sense of 'find'? Can we use the copula 'to be' in sentence 3? Why (not)?
Also, I presume the negation doesn't make a difference:
3a) He came home to find his wife not dead.
Do you have the same problem with the negator position of 3a, teechar/5jj? Surely it's not the same thing to say 'He came home not to find his wife dead', is it? It may sound a bit of a strange thing to say, but I think 3a is fine. I mean, I think it's grammatical, logical and it could be an example of good, natural and appropriate English in the right context.