Abstract
What is the semantic contribution of anaphoric links in sentences like, ‘A physicist was late to the party. He brought some bongos’? A natural first thought is that the passage entails a wide-scope existential claim that there is something that both (i) was late to the party and (ii) brought some bongos. Intentional identity sentences are counter-examples to this natural thought applied to anaphora in general. Some have tried to rescue the thought and accommodate the counter-examples by positing mythical objects. I present a new intentional identity sentence that cannot be so accommodated. I then propose a new account of intentional identity and other anaphoric sentences that does not appeal to mythical objects, but instead draws on traditional accounts of definite descriptions.
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Notes
Geurts (1999) is the first instance known to me where sentences like (3) are discussed.
It is difficult to exactly characterize anaphora, or to find general rules describing when it can occur. In semantics, Karttunen (1976) and Heim (1982) published seminal work on these topics. Schlenker (2011) discusses interesting recent developments. Syntax discussions of ‘binding’ look at similar issues.
While (WSE) is an obvious fleshing-out of the commonly repeated thought that anaphora communicates that one is ‘referring to the same thing’, (WSE) clearly does not accurately describe the infamous donkey sentences. Extending the thought behind (WSE) to donkey sentences will be non-trivial. One will need to make some adjustments as well for certain logically complex discourses, e.g., those embedded under a wide-scope negation.
The tools of dynamic semantics (e.g., Kamp and Reyle 1993) provide one way of giving a semantics of anaphora that would entail (WSE). Description theories that I discuss below are another way.
This is Roberts’ (1989) example of what she called ‘modal subordination’, and she distinguished two problems it raises. First, there is some sort of continuation from the possibilities discussed in the earlier sentence to the possibilities discussed in the later sentence, and second the exact meaning of ‘it’ is mysterious.
Others have noticed that sometimes a change in causal facts can accompany a change in the truth-value of an intentional identity sentence (e.g., van Rooy 2000; Cumming 2007; Glick 2012). These authors’ discussions, however, have several other changes accompanying the change in the causal facts, in such a way that it is easy to attribute the change in truth-value to the other changes.
See Friedell’s (2012) example 5 for a different counterexample to (WSE) combined with mythical objects. I believe my counterexample applies to (WSE) in general, regardless of which exotic objects one has satisfying the existential entailments, whereas his only specifically applies to mythical objects.
Perhaps (WSE) should be restricted so that it does not apply to so-called ‘pronouns of laziness’—roughly, those used to avoid tedious repetition of previous linguistic material. Are the pronouns in (9) and (10) merely ‘pronouns of laziness’? (9)’s ‘it’ does seem to be replaceable with ’the apartment Hob buys’ without significantly changing the meaning. This is, however, not a mere repetition of some previously appearing syntactic unit; the phrase ‘apartment Hob buys’ is not a syntactic constituent of the previous material, and on the traditional semantic account there is no constituent in the previous material with this phrase’s semantic value. One could indeed construct such a unit by combining various previously-appearing constituents, but I argue below that on at least the standard way of having enough semantic machinery to account for these cases, we can extend this account to also cover the harder cases like (G).
Earlier authors all the way back to Geach (1967) have discussed whether the pronouns are functioning like definite descriptions, but they did not consider incomplete definite descriptions (which I define below); they only considered complete definite descriptions whose semantic values were mostly constructed from the semantic values of preceding linguistic material, and they rightly concluded that such an account could not fully explain all the data.
Sentence (3) correctly suggests that our examples have variants with names as well: ‘Hob thinks a witch named ‘Gertie’ has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether Gertie killed Cob’s sow’. This shows that there is a link between the problem of intentional identity and that of empty names. Hawthorne and Manley (2012) suggest applying semantic accounts of empty names to intentional identity sentences, but empty names themselves are very confusing, and I think that we should first see if definite description accounts suggest a correct account of these sentences.
Heim and Kratzer (1998) give an introduction to the semantics of definite descriptions.
Under contemporary Fregean semantics of intensional sentences, their contribution is typically a function that assigns to each possible world the thing (if such there be) that the description picks out at that world.
There are also theories of incomplete definite descriptions where the semantic value of an incomplete definite description is not contextually-dependent, but where the context instead affects the situations described by the sentence. Barwise and Perry (1983) give an influential theory of this kind. Kratzer (2011) provides an overview of these types of theories, which I will not discuss.
Example 7 in Edelberg (1986) is another intentional identity sentence where the complete definite description cannot have a semantic value mostly constructed from values of explicit material earlier in the sentence. Edelberg’s example, though, is not as problematic for the description approach as (G) is. Glick (2012) asserts that Edelberg’s example ‘convincingly demonstrate[s]’ that the definite description approach is not adequate. However, since our complete descriptions do not have to have semantic values mostly constructed from those of earlier material, Edelberg’s example is easily accommodated: ‘he’ in Edelberg’s (26) can correspond to ‘the man who shot Smith’, and ‘he’ in (27) to ‘the man who shot Jones’.
See Burge (1983), though he proposes a very different semantic account of intentional identity.
Soames (1998, pp. 13–17) and Williamson (2000, pp. 293–294) argue that many propositional attitude ascriptions containing ‘actual’ require that the subject of the ascription has de re attitudes about the actual world—attitudes that would have been very difficult to have if the actual world had not obtained. For those who accept their picture of ‘actual’, my complete description containing ‘actual’ does not accurately communicate the truth conditions I am intending for these sentences, and they should focus instead on this more detailed gloss not containing ‘actual’.
For uniformity considerations, I propose that these are also the sorts of syntactic structures involved in sentences and contexts like the non-modally-embedded Geach ones. In cases like \((\hbox{G}^\prime)\) where there is no modal operator under which the intentional identity sentences are embedded, the ‘w’ variable in the implicit restrictor is assigned to the matrix clause world of evaluation. This is what would naturally happen in, e.g., von Fintel and Heim’s exposition of world variables (2011, c. 8). In effect, this gives the description the semantic value of ‘the witch described by the actual common communication link’, as we proposed earlier.
Hawthorne and Manley (2012) give arguments that support being liberal about de re thought in general. The trivial belief Nob has might be different in different scenarios. For example, if Nob believes he was really the first to describe the witch to others, he will always retain the trivial belief that the witch described by any speakers he actually informed is wreaking havoc.
I owe an anonymous reviewer for constructing and pressing me to consider a case similar to the one in this paragraph.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Daniel Rothschild, Michael Gibb, an anonymous referee, an audience at Oxford, and especially Cian Dorr.
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Lanier, W. Intentional identity and descriptions. Philos Stud 170, 289–302 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0218-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0218-3