Metaphysics and Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 5, TT23)

Counterpart theory is the family of theories about de re modal attributions according to which an individual possibly has a property just in case there is a counterpart of that individual which has that property in some world. While David Lewis originally proposed counterpart theory as an extensional alternative to quantified modal logic, philosophers of language and linguists have offered a host of reasons for why counterpart theory is needed in order to provide an adequate description of the meanings of certain fragments of natural language. This paper investigates the suitability of counterpart theory as an ontological foundation for natural language semantics.