We are all children of God
pp. 39-60
in: Jaysankar Lal Shaw (ed), Analytical philosophy in comparative perspective, Berlin, Springer, 1985Abstract
In a recent article, "An Immaculate Conception of Modality", Brian Skyrms [14] has shewn how to interpret the necessity operator in various modal systems as a metalinguistic predicate of sentences. The principal task of the present paper will be to shew that any intensional operator may be construed in this way. I will then make some remarks about the philosophical importance of this fact, the burden of which will be that it frees a philosopher to do things intensionally or metalinguistically according to taste. I will then link the equivalence proofs with some suggestions Robert Stalnaker has made in connection with the problem of the semantics of propositional attitudes. The paper is self-contained but I suspect that a better appreciation of what is going on will be aided by a careful reading of Skyrms" paper. Also, some familiarity with Stalnaker"s use of double indexing in, e.g., [16] will help in the later sections. I would like to thank Steve Boer who drew my attention to the Skyrms article when he was in Wellington in July and August of 1979.
