Abstract for Friederike Moltmann's talk

Weak Reference or the True Semantics of of 'Relative Identity Statements
Friederike Moltmann (Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Université Paris 1)
May 16, 2007 (Wednesday)
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM; the CUNY Graduate Center

Suppose you are looking at two photographs of two distinct statues made from the same lump of clay (at different times). In this situation an utterance of the sentence below can be both acceptable and true:

(1) This is the same lump of clay but not the same statue as that.

(1) seems to describe relations of relative identity in the sense of Geach: being identical relative to the sortal 'lump of clay', but not relative to the sortal 'statue'.
Statements like (1) touch core issues not only in metaphysics (the nature of identity), but also in linguistic syntax and semantics. (1) is in fact not a sentence predicating a relation of two arguments, but rather a specificational sentence, just like (2a, b):

(2) What I saw was Mary.

'This' and that' in (1) are not ordinary demonstratives', but 'presentational pronouns', which are limited to the subject position of specificational sentences and which make reference to particularized properties (or 'tropes') representing an individual in the context, as also in (3):

(3) This is a beautiful woman. (looking at someone passing by)

Specificational sentences with 'this' and 'that' cannot be accounted for within any of the standard analyses of specificational sentences, however. On the basis of a new analysis of sepcificational sentences with 'this' or 'that', I will argue that sentences like (1), the only natural way of expressing putative cases of 'relative identity', do not in fact involve relative identity, but standard absolute identity. The analysis can dispense also with such highly problematic notions as 'reference without identity', which Dummett had invoked for pronouns like 'this and 'that', and indeterminate reference, which had been suggested by Perry for the same purpose.