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This paper critiques the conventional treatment of intensional anaphora as quantifiers over possible worlds, revealing inconsistencies in how antecedents function in intensional contexts compared to quantificational ones. The authors argue for a description-based account of intensional anaphora, asserting that a pronoun's antecedent must be instantiated in every candidate world for the anaphora to be valid. They introduce a new logical framework, Plural Intensional Presuppositional predicate calculus (PIP), which aligns with standard first-order predicate calculus and provides a robust foundation for their findings.
Intensional anaphora challenges traditional views, revealing that antecedents can exist in theory yet still fail to support anaphoric references in practice.
Intensional operators are often treated as quantifiers over possible worlds, parallel to the treatment of determiners as quantifiers over individuals. Yet individuals introduced in intensional contexts cannot serve as antecedents to later pronouns as easily as those introduced in merely quantificational contexts. For instance,"Everyone is eating a cheeseburger"may be followed by"They are large", where"they"refers to the cheeseburgers being eaten. However, as Stone (1999) points out, the similar"Andrea might be eating a cheeseburger"does not support later anaphoric references such as"It is large"or"They are large". Stone (1999), Stone and Hardt (1999), and Brasoveanu (2010) address this by requiring a pronoun's value (its referents) to exist in the world of evaluation, ruling out anaphora from non-veridical intensional contexts. We show, however, both cases where such anaphora is disallowed even when the pronoun's referents clearly exist and cases where it is allowed even though they might not exist. We argue that intensional anaphora is best captured using a description-based rather than value-based account. A pronoun presupposes that its corresponding antecedent description is instantiated in each world of the context set. Thus, there must be a cheeseburger being eaten by Andrea in every candidate world for"It is large"to be felicitous after"Andrea might be eating a cheeseburger". We implement our proposal via a new logic, building on Keshet (2018) and Abney and Keshet (2022), called Plural Intensional Presuppositional predicate calculus (PIP). Each PIP formula translates directly into standard first-order predicate calculus with set abstraction, providing a classical foundation for this work.