However you solve the details of the intensionality problem, it is quite clear that you will not find a general substitution principle which would be truth preserving in the context of „I believe, etc. Whether the Morning Star and the Evening Star are substitutable depends on nothing else, but whether they are “the same thing” for the subject of the sentence. It does not depend on any “fact” facts, but on whether man-in-the-street, educated or not, treats them as the same thing. This is not a very comforting conclusion, if you want to build a general truth-conditional semantics.
A similar conclusion seems to stem from the discussion (which I am trying to study now) on the slingshot argument. In his review of Steven Neal’s Facing the Facts John McFarlane writes: “The slingshot is not a single argument, but a family of arguments designed to show that the intentional entities (facts, state of affairs, propositions) must be individuated either so finely or so crudely that they can do no useful work”. Hopefully, one day I will fully comprehend the slingshot argument and give it a clear presentation on this blog. Just give me some time. At the moment I can just say that parts of McFarlane’s sentence could be taken as part of my the conclusion of my own discussion in previous notes.
Given these difficulties, I wonder what people are even thinking of doing, when they try to build semantics upon the concept facts, situations, rather than things and relations. When are two situations identical? Are the two situations
“The astronomer sees the Morning Star”
“The astronomer sees the Evening Star”
identical?
There are so many problems with extensional phenomena that basing your philosophy of language on intensional entities seems a suicidal mission. But I know that some practitioners of situational semantics are not suicidal. I will need to talk to them.
Marco
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