New Machinery, Olden Tasks?

Abstract

This reply to Oleg Domanov’s target paper is not concerned with the technicalities of the proposed approach. Rather, I discuss the fruitfulness of the underlying ideas in dealing with Quine’s famous “double vision” scenario, for which the approach is designed. I point out some key ingredients of Domanov’s proposal: (a) context dependence of propositional attitude ascription (and ascribability); (b) replacement of individuals with finer-grained entities for reference and quantification, such as Kaplan’s “vivid names”, Frege and Yalcin’s senses or Percus and Sauerland’s concept generators; and (c) using the apparatus of cross-identification functions. I show that those ingredients were already present in a body of work preceding the target paper. On the other hand, there are known problems related to the fact that sometimes the choice of the pertinent mode of presentation depends on the choices associated with quantifiers higher in the syntactic tree. No account based on manipulations with the global context, such as Domanov’s in its current form, can handle them.