Like previous, but now only partial overlap of content. Also, antecedent-dependence relations cross two attitude verbs.
Yesterday, upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there! He wasn’t there again today Oh how I wish he’d go away! … Last night I saw upon the stair, A little man who wasn’t there, … (by William Hughes Mearns, 1899, inspired by reports of a ghost in Antigonish, Novia Scotia)
Can “I [met] saw α” be true if there is no α? Geach thinks so but won’t argue for it here.
Denied that JP-9 is equivalent to:
— both by direct intuition, and because (some think — see Edelberg06 §3) it implies (what clearly isn’t entailed by JP-9):
should not entail:
And:
should not entail:
Let’s agree with most commentators that G has a use/reading that can be true even if there are no witches.
Edelberg thinks some uses/readings of G may commit speaker to existence of a witch, or at least a specific real object that Hob takes to be a witch. But others don’t. He uses de re/“de dicto” (later just “Geach reading”) to mark this contrast in “inference patterns.”
The Geach reading doesn’t require the subjects to think of the witch in entirely the same way. (Even if it’s a repeated single subject: there can be Geach-like Frege cases.)
her is a “lazy pronoun” (see below). <~–
Geach conflates unspecific intensional transitives with Hob/Nob not having “some one person in mind as a suspected witch.”
–>
As theorists, say what do Hob/Nob’s minds have to be like, for G to be true/false?
Their minds having a common focus can be reported without Geach’s anaphora, for example with (JP-3,4,5) or “Hob and Nob fear the same witch.”
Explain semantics of (especially) G-type sentences in such a way that they have the agreed truth-conditions.
Geach rejects such analyses of (G), because they imply there is “some definite person” Hob and Nob have in mind, but (G) doesn’t. Edelberg accepts these only as capturing de re uses of G. Denies that they capture the Geach reading of G, or that analagous forms capture his Grandma sentence (Edelberg06-14 above).
“Pronoun of laziness”: replace “she” with definite description constructed from words of/around antecedent.
Geach rejects this analysis of (G), because it implies that Nob has thoughts about [Hob’s thoughts about] Bob’s mare, but (G) doesn’t. (G can be true in Examples 2/3.)
Lazy pronouns are needed to handle cases like:
where the speaker doesn’t commit/expresses doubt about any witch’s existence. See also [Non-]Example 5, above.
Against (JP-19)-type analyses: see Edelberg06 §4.
From pp. 7ff, Edelberg86 considers views that analyze G as Geach-5rev, without the initial quantifier committing speaker to any real/concrete existing object.
Edelberg86 pp.8-10 argues that variants of this that appeal to substituting (non-designating) names or descriptions for a witch/she don’t really have much advantage over views that allows a witch/she to designate exotic objects.
Candidate exotic objects:
abstract objects, like characters in a fiction
non-existent objects, that nonetheless satisfy some relations and can “be quantified”
Sandgren18 distinguishes:
Here we’re just considering the claim that Geach-5rev gives the logical form of G — compatible with either of those explanatory strategies.
Edelberg’s objections to exotic object views assume that our logic treats (unembedded) φ ∧ ψ as equivalent to ψ ∧ φ; and these examples:
In Edelberg’s Example 6, A and B both (wrongly) think both Smith and Jones were murdered, and that all the murderers are still in Chicago. A thinks there were two murderers (one for Smith, a different one for Jones). B thinks just one.
That case testifies that (19) could (on a natural reading) be true, while (20) is (on a natural reading) false. But the exotic object views would make (19) entail (20).
A lazy-pronoun analysis, on the other hand, can explain why (19) doesn’t entail (20), though it couldn’t explain truth of G in Examples 2/3. Also Edelberg’s Example 7 + sentences 26/27 (with “the mayor” replacing “Smith”, and “the commissioner” replacing “Jones”, only A knows of Smith’s job and death, only B knows of Jones’ job and death) is a more complicated version of Example 6 + sentences 19/20 where the lazy-pronoun strategy doesn’t work.
More Edelberg examples:
Edelberg argues that (30) has a false reading in his Example, and (31) and (JP-20) have true readings. (Observations like these leave open that the sentences may also have other readings.)
Edelberg86 pp. 18ff considers the view that what people “believe in” are thought-objects like *Santa* and *the person who shot Smith.* Is this another “exotic object” view? If we use it to analyze G in form Geach-5rev.
One version: these thought-objects can appear in many people’s thoughts (and not all are required to believe that *the person who shot Smith* shot Smith). Another version: a thought-object can only appear in one person’s thoughts, will instead have counterparts (≈) in other people’s thoughts.
Saying *the person who shot Smith* ≈ *the person who shot Jones* can’t explain why (Edelberg86-19) true but (20) false.
Saying they’re ≉ can’t explain falsity of (30), since each of the candidate objects seems to validate (30).
What if we say there are three thought-objects, *the person who shot Smith* and *the person who shot Jones* (both in A’s thoughts, and believed by A to be distinct), and *the person who shot Smith and Jones* (in B’s thoughts)? That can explain falsity of (30) but not truth of (31) and (JP-20).
Edelberg suspects we need all three thought objects to be in B’s thoughts, and the ones shared with A to be “parts” of B’s *the person who shot Smith and Jones.*
How to distinguish Hob/Nob’s thoughts that the witch is scary, involving the thought-object *their witch*, from the theorist’s thought that *their witch* (like other thought-objects) is scary?
Natural to say that everything we think about (even thought-objects) is via thought-objects; it’s just that in some cases these designate something real, in other cases not.
Interlude about Disjoint Unions/Algebraic Datatypes. This can alleviate worries about “exoticness.”
But then how to deal with anaphora in/outside of embeddings, as in (JP-1,2)? Or:
Wouldn’t Hob be using a plural thought-object, *the witch and these children*? How are we able to make unembedded anaphoric reference to the children themselves?