TY - CHAP

T1 - Intentional Identity as a Transparency Phenomenon

AU - Tiskin, Daniel

N1 - Funding Information: Thanks to the audiences at Ede Zimmermann?s semantics colloquium at Goethe University in Frankfurt and at the Pronouns Workshop in T?bingen (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. Publisher Copyright: © 2018, Springer International Publishing AG. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - 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).

AB - 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).

KW - Anaphoric Pronouns

KW - Hold Positions

KW - Intentional Identity

KW - Ortcutt

KW - World Beliefs

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85101999997&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-56706-8_2

DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-56706-8_2

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85101999997

T3 - Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

SP - 43

EP - 73

BT - Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

PB - Springer Nature

ER -