WSU Colloquium talk: Split Intensionality
Ezra Keshet gave the colloquium talk on Friday, Nov. 14 for Wayne State’s Colloquium series. The talk was entitled: Split Intensionality: A New Theory of De re/De dicto Distinction.
Abstract
The traditional scope theory of intensionality (STI) is inadequate, as evidenced by the scope paradoxes discussed in Fodor (1970), Bauerle (1983), and Percus (2000). For instance, the STI predicts (1) to mean something like “each democrat is such that if s/he were a republican, there would be only one political party” — clearly the wrong meaning for this sentence.
(1) If every democrat were a republican, there would only be one political party.
This talk will therefore propose a replacement for the STI, called split intensionality. Compared to an earlier replacement for the STI, the situation pronoun theory, split intensionality represents a more modest departure. The split intensionality system separates each intensional operator’s quantificational force from its intensional force, by use of a new operator, ^ (after Montague 1970). This move proves enough to solve the problems of the STI without overgenerating — as the situation pronoun theory does. In particular, the talk will focus on new data involving island constraints and negative polarity items that supports the split intensionality system over the situation pronoun system.