Individuals Explained Away
Edward Louis Keenan · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
This chapter provides a semantic analysis of agentive common noun phrases (surgeon, flautist,. . .) and their non-extensional evaluative modifiers: skillful, talented, . . .The surgeons and the flautists may be the same individuals, but the skillful surgeons and the skillful flautists different individuals. So modifiers like skillful, talented, etc. are properly intensional. The analysis generalizes standard extensional semantics and invokes no new unknowns, such as possible worlds. It does eliminate the universe from our model theoretic ontology, posing a challenge for Direct Reference Theory. Instead of taking truth values and a universe as primitive this chapter takes truth values and a non-atomic boolean set of properties, possible common noun denotations, as primitive and defines proper noun denotations in terms of these. The analysis derives several other semantically interesting properties of English.