All the Superhero's Names

Studia Semiotyczne 30 (2):11-44 (2016)
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Abstract

In this paper I concern myself with The Superman Puzzle. I argue that the descriptive content associated with proper names, besides determining the proper name's reference, function as truthconditionally relevant adjuncts which can be used to express a manner, reason, goal, time or purpose of action. In that way a sentence with a proper name NN is doing something could be understood as NN is doing something as NN. I argue that the substitution of names can fail on modified readings because the different descriptive content of proper names modifies the main predicate differently. Here I present a formal representation of modified predicates which allows one to model intuitively the different truth-conditions of sentences from The Puzzle.

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Olga Poller
Jagiellonian University

References found in this work

Mental Files.François Recanati - 2012 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
The logical form of action sentences.Donald Davidson - 1967 - In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action. University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 81--95.
First-Order Modal Logic.Melvin Fitting & Richard L. Mendelsohn - 1998 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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