A Relationist Theory of Intentional Identity

This essay argues for a relationist treatment of intentional identity sentences like (1): (1) Hob believes that a witch blighted Bob’s mare and Nob believes that she killed Cob’s sow. According to relationism, facts of the form a believes that ϕ and b believes that ψ are not in general reducible to facts of the form c believes that χ. I first argue that extant, non-relationist treatments of intentional identity are unsatisfactory, and then go on to motivate and explore a relationist alternative in some detail. I show that the general thesis of relationism can be directly motivated via cases already discussed in the literature, and then develop a particular version of relationism couched in the possible worlds framework. The resulting theory avoids the problems facing its non-relationist rivals, and yields a natural account of the truth conditions of (1), truth conditions which can be generated in a compositional manner by a version of dynamic semantics. The theory also helps us to cleanly separate semantic questions about intentional identity from metasemantic ones.