Intentional Identity Interpreted: A Case Study of the Relations among Quantifiers, Pronouns, and Propositional Attitudes

A problem in philosophical logic has puzzled philosophers, linguists and philosophically-minded logicians. This is the problem which Peter T. Geach (1967) has called the problem of 'intentional identity'. This problem arises for sentences which contain two propositional attitudes, one of them syntactically dominating a quantifier phrase and the other dominating a pronoun whose antecedent is the quantifier phrase. In this paper, my purpose will be twofold. On the one hand, I shall present a semantics for sentences of this Geachian form in their full variety. On the other hand, I shall put forward a solution to Geach's puzzle in the sense that I shall present semantics for the kind of reading which, I will argue, was intended by Geach. In both these problem areas the discussion is (to the best of my knowledge) the first systematic study available in the literature.