Substitution Puzzles and Substitutional Semantics

Abstract

Substitution failure is usually said to occur when a change from one co-referential name to another affects the truth value of the sentence. Taking the idea seriously that non-referring names like ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent’ are indeed names and that they do not refer (to anything whatsoever), it is argued that the usual characterization does not only give rise to theories which inflate ontology but that it falls short of capturing substitution puzzles about constructions which involve nonreferring terms. The paper suggests a more general characterization of substitution failure and proposes an account of (ignorant and enlightened) anti-substitution intuitions which does not invoke referents at all. The account is made formally precise in terms of associative substitutional semantics.