Abstract

In the paper, I develop what I call the “Neo-Hintikkan theory” of belief sentences. What is characteristic of this approach is that the meaning of an ascription is analyzed in terms of the believer’s “epistemic alternatives”: the set of worlds compatible with how the believer takes the world to be. The Neo-Hintikkan approach proceeds by assuming that (1) individuals in believers’ alternatives can share spatio-temporal parts with actual individuals, and (2) ascribers can refer to individuals in believer’s alternatives in virtue of their perceptual or causal interaction with the spatio-temporal parts these “believed individuals” share with actual individuals. The guiding idea underlying this view is that the source of substitutivity failure in certain central cases is that believers have put the spatio-temporal parts of the objects they have encountered together in the wrong way.