Delia Graff. “Desires, Scope and Tense”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/graff/./papers/desires.pdf. Forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives. Earlier drafts were titled “Descriptions in Desire Ascriptions”.
bq. According to James McCawley (1981) and Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal (1995), the following sentence is three-ways ambiguous: Harry wants to be the mayor of Kenai. According to them also, the three-way ambiguity cannot be accommodated on the Russellian view that definite descriptions are quantified noun phrases. In order to capture the three-way ambiguity of the sentence, these authors propose that definite descriptions must be ambiguous: sometimes they are predicate expressions; sometimes they are Russellian quantified noun phrases. After explaining why the McCawley-Larson-Segal solution contains an obvious flaw, I discuss how an effort to correct the flaw brings to light certain puzzles about the individuation of desires, quantifying in, and the disambiguation of desire ascriptions.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Thursday, September 4th, 2003, at 9:02 pm.
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