Names, Masks, and Double Vision

Abstract

Cumming (2008) argues that his Masked Ball problem undermines Millianism, and that we must instead treat names as variables. However, although the Masked Ball does pose a problem for the Millian given a standard view about the meaning of 'believes', that view faces difficulties for independent reasons. I develop a novel "neo-Kaplanian" attitude semantics to address this problem, and go on to show that with this alternative semantics in hand, the Millian is quite capable of accounting for the Masked Ball.

Perspectives

“…The claim by Cumming (2008) that names are variables seems at least superficially similar to our analysis of contentious names like Spider-Man, but a careful comparison would deserve a paper in its own right. Cumming (2008) contends that the scenario is a problem for standard Millianism, but recent work by Rieppel (2015) gives reason to doubt this conclusion. 45 Again the system generates six non-equivalent readings (see footnote 40), which are further reduced in this case as we have the same linguistic term appearing twice and combined with a commutative predicate (is).…”

On Mates's puzzle

“…A compositional implementation of the proposed solution is offered, relying on the concept generator (CG) theory of Percus and Sauerland (2003) (see also Charlow & Sharvit, 2014). The CG machinery was devised with the aim of providing specialised LFs for de se/re belief reports in possible worlds semantics and has been applied to double vision cases (Anand, 2006, chapter 1; Rieppel, 2017), as well as to objects of de re thought beyond individuals (Baron, 2015). The basic idea behind CGs seems intuitively applicable to Mates's puzzle: CGs map the res in a belief report to a way in which the attitude holder thinks of that res .…”

Binding bound variables in epistemic contexts

“…I make no claim to novelty in detail-my contributions here involve summary, emphasis, and gestures toward new horizons. Central to my discussion is the idea that certain modals ought to be understood as "assignment-shifting" devices: Various theorists have been toying with assignmentshifting treatments of epistemic contexts such as attitude verbs and epistemic modals (e.g., Cumming 2008, Santorio 2012, Ninan 2012, Pickel 2015, Rieppel 2017). On such views an epistemic " " ends up binding the x in Fx.…”