External and internal same: A unified account motivated by attitude reports

Abstract

I use empirical evidence from attitude reports to motivate a new characterization of natural language identity relation. More specifically, when de dicto attitude reports express an identity relation (e.g., John thinks A is B, John thinks A and B are the same), felicitous de re reports corresponding to them are systematically absent. This finding means that the identity relation encoded in natural language cannot be analyzed as a simple co-reference relation. Instead, I propose that in a given context, the identity relation between A and B means that contextually salient properties of A hold in certain worlds (e.g., in the belief worlds of an attitude holder) for B and vice versa. Based on this, I propose a new unified account for internal and external uses of same. Essentially, same is anaphoric: its antecedent is a plurality of individuals (i.e., res) and same means the intersection of contextually salient properties of each atomic individual involved in an identity relation.