Abstract
Intentional Identity, introduced by Geach (J Philos 64(20):627–632, 1967), refers to pairs of attitude reports where a pronoun embedded into the second report is anaphoric on a quantifier embedded into the first one. In the Geach sentence (Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob thinks she killed Cob’s sow) the antecedent carries no commitment to the existence of witches, and moreover the sentence does not require that Nob should know anything about Hob or Hob’s mental state. This fact has given rise to the conviction, almost universally shared, that in Intentional Identity reports the anaphoric pronoun cannot be D-type, i.e. that it cannot borrow its reference and descriptive content directly from its antecedent.
We show that the perceived non-committing truth conditions can be derived via a D-type analysis of pronouns, which are taken to be syntactically complex. The crucial ingredient of the proposal is that the predicate within a pronoun in Intentional Identity ascriptions receives a “non-specific transparent” reading (in the sense of Fodor (The linguistic description of opaque contents. PhD dissertion, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1970); Schwager (Proc SALT 19:395–412, 2009)), so the second attitude holder (e.g. Nob) is required to know Hob’s thoughts no more than Ralph is required to know Ortcutt’s name in the famous scenario due to Quine (J Philos 53(5):177–187, 1956).
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Notes
- 1.
Geach alludes to mediæval scholars, in particular to Buridan; but the latter seems to have only discussed what is now known as intensional transitive verbs, as in
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(i)
I owe you a horse.
For a modern overview of the literature on intensional transitives, see Schwarz (2015).
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(i)
- 2.
Even splitting the scope of the quantifier proper and the restrictor in the style of Szabó (2010) does not help, as there is plainly no object s.t. Hob’s and Nob’s beliefs are about it, be it a witch or not.
- 3.
- 4.
“It seems that in all…cases [of Intentional Identity], either Nob heard about the witch from Hob, or Hob from Nob, or both heard about the witch from some third party” (Edelberg 1992, 572). As will be seen in Sect. 2, the first two cases out of the three listed are far less problematic than the last one.
- 5.
In our interpretation of what is going on in (4), we follow Nouwen (forthcoming). See also the treatment of (21) in Sect. 3.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Or alternatively, a real or mythical witch, as in Salmon’s subsequent work—a change made to account for cases where there is no mythical witch but rather a real individual whom Hob and Nob believe to be a witch.
- 10.
Cf. also Saarinen’s (1979) approach in terms of game-theoretical semantics using backward-looking operators that set the point of evaluation back to its previous value.
- 11.
The backslash notation may be thought of as the in-line notation for partially ordered (branching) quantifiers (Henkin 1961); introducing this symbol increases the expressive power of the language.
- 12.
The terminology may be confusing here. Geach (1967) uses the term pronoun of laziness, but he does not view she in (2) as a full syntactic and semantic duplicate of its antecedent, in contrast to cases like (ii)–(iii).
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(ii)
This year the president is a Democrat. Next year, he will be a Republican. (Nouwen forthcoming, a.o.)
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(iii)
The man who gave his paycheck to his wife is wiser than the man who gave it to his mistress. (Karttunen 1969)
cf. also the discussion about the terms E-type (due to Evans 1977) and D-type in Neale (1990, 184 ff.), where the term D-type is reserved for descriptive cases like (ii)–(iii) and the term E-type for unbound individual variable-like cases.
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(ii)
- 13.
- 14.
In what follows, we shall put expressives aside, but some authors note that they can get an “opaque” reading as well, thereby displaying the transparent/opaque ambiguity characteristic of ordinary predicates in attitude contexts:
- 15.
- 16.
Similar observations have been independently made by Bäuerle (1983).
- 17.
- 18.
I use this example of Båve’s without endorsing the ideas he illustrates using it.
- 19.
For some phenomena outside the scope of the present paper, this might be not enough; see e.g. Stone and Hardt (1999) for the discussion of accessibility in the context of Modal Subordination.
- 20.
The construction \(\Sigma _{i}(P(x_{i}); Q(x_{i}))\) is a combination of a conjunction and the sum operator, so its dynamic contribution is as in
$$\displaystyle{G[\Sigma _{i}(P(x_{i}); Q(x_{i}))] =\bigcup \{ G^{{\prime}}[P(x_{ i})][Q(x_{i})]\mid G^{{\prime}} =\{ g^{[i\mapsto d]}\mid d \in D_{e},g \in G\}\}.}$$ - 21.
In order to avoid subscripts on variables, we will henceforth allow for shorthand expressions such as \(\Sigma _{x}\phi (x)\), Every w ϕ(w) etc. instead of \(\Sigma _{i}\phi (x_{i})\), Every j ϕ(w j ) etc.
- 22.
This is why no information about x is lost when the input state is updated with Every x (⊤)(ϕ(x)); if x is mapped to a witch in G, so it will be in G[Every x (⊤)(ϕ(x))].
- 23.
See fn. 12 on the use of terms E-type and D-type.
- 24.
For Edelberg himself, as we remember, the E-type/D-type theory is a non-starter. This is because he implicitly excludes the possibility of a transparent construal of the anaphoric pronoun. His reluctance to admit transparency can be seen from how he treats a simpler example where the existence of a single murderer, incidentally also the world’s shortest man, is assumed:
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(vi)
The shortest man in the world murdered Smith, and Detective X thinks he is still in Chicago. (cf. (Edelberg 1992, 587, fn. 24))
Here, Edelberg argues, he cannot be an E-type/D-type pronoun, for its replacement with the shortest man in the world would result in a falsity unless X knows about his height. But it simply would not once we assume that he (or the shortest man in the world, if substituted) gets a de re reading.
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(vi)
- 25.
An anonymous reviewer has called our attention to the relevant passages in Kamp et al. (2011, 382 ff., esp. pp. 383–384). The discussion there is centred around the example (vii), considered in a scenario where noone has in fact broken into Phoebe’s garden.
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(vii)
Phoebe believes that a man broke into her garden and that he stole her prize zucchini. Ella thinks he didn’t take anything.
The question is how much of the descriptive content characterising the alleged burglar has to be accommodated to the matrix DRS (discourse representation structure) in order for the pronoun in the second sentence to get its reference. As long as there is disagreement between Phoebe and Ella as to whether the man took anything, the part he stole her prize zucchini cannot be accommodated, because otherwise Ella’s belief would come out self-contradictory.
Such an approach, where the amount of material to be accommodated is determined “on the spot,” reminds of the brief remarks towards the end of van Rooij and Zimmermann’s (1996) paper concerning the non-literal status of Intentional Identity w.r.t. the usual de re reading of the first holder’s attitude report. Only in case the usual de re cannot be made sense of (as e.g. in the canonical scenario for (2)) is the sentence reinterpreted as an Intentional Identity ascription.
Although we do believe that this train of thought conveys an important intuition, the present paper attempts to give a more uniform approach, where the semantics of an anaphoric pronoun is the same in all cases.
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(vii)
- 26.
Let us explain the intuition behind the arrow notation. The counterpart relation is generally not symmetric, so just to write something like “Count(a, b)” would not be explicit enough as to which of a and b is whose counterpart. Therefore, we have chosen to point to the “original” with an arrow (
), whose flat end is intended to touch the counterpart. E.g. 
should mean that b is a’s counterpart. - 27.
The machinery of concept generators (Percus and Sauerland 2003; Percus 2013; Charlow and Sharvit 2014) should be viewed as a sort of substitutional analysis. Concept generators (CGs) are 〈e, se〉-type functions that provide, for a given (normally actual) individual x, an acquaintance function (for a given attitude holder) that returns the individual in the holder’s attitudinal alternatives w that plays the epistemic role of x at w. So far CGs have been applied to de re readings of referential and quantificational expressions, but not to transparent readings of predicates.
Note that CGs can combine with a DP whose restrictor predicate is evaluated at the actual world:
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(viii)
Mary thinks that the mayor is a spy.
Mary thinks λCGλw[ [CG [the@ mayor]] is_a_spy w ]
The reason for this combination to be needed is that [the@ mayor] returns an actual individual, to whom several individuals may correspond in Mary’s belief worlds (imagine a double vision scenario for Mary and the mayor along the lines of (13)); the choice of the corresponding individual is made by the CG.
As mentioned at the very beginning of the present section, it is unlikely that there is any acquaintance relation between Hob’s imaginary witches and Nob’s ones, and certainly, there is no actual individual whose counterparts-via-acquaintance are Nob’s suspect witches. Therefore, we do not consider the use of CGs an option as regards Intentional Identity.
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(viii)
- 28.
See Sudo (2014), where the relation between P and Q is called contextual equivalence.
- 29.
As we have suggested before (Tiskin 2014), the inability of reflexives to get a de re reading on their own relates to the fact that they are semantically not predicates but rather arity-reducers for their verbs (Szabolcsi 1989; Lubowicz 1999; Lechner 2012); here, we believe, lies the source of the patterns for “bound de re” readings (Charlow 2010; Sharvit 2011).
- 30.
Strictly speaking, no free variables are allowed in Nouwen’s system, whereas pro is free; hence the “…” marks.
- 31.
For another case where the main predicate of the subordinate clause gets a non-specific transparent reading, consider (16).
), whose flat end is intended to touch the counterpart. E.g. 
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the audiences at Ede Zimmermann’s semantics colloquium at Goethe University in Frankfurt and at the Pronouns Workshop in Tübingen (2014), as well as to Sarah Zobel and two anonymous referees for their comments. The remaining errors are solely the author’s. The title of this paper, unexpectedly for the author, matches the title of a section in Pietarinen (2001), “Intentional Identity as an Independence Phenomenon.” Although this was initially not intended, the coincidence makes good sense.
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Tiskin, D. (2018). Intentional Identity as a Transparency Phenomenon. In: Patel-Grosz, P., Grosz, P., Zobel, S. (eds) Pronouns in Embedded Contexts at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 99. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56706-8_2
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