Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

156 Presuppositions and Pronouns
will be roughly the following: 'There is an a and a b; a believes that there is a
c such that c is a sheep; and band b c are counterparts'.
As Lewis (1968: 114) says, 'The counterpart relation is our substitute for
identity between things in different worlds.' But it is a powerful substitute. It
allows us to say, for instance, that a thing in one world has several
counterparts in another world; or that a thing in one world has no
counterpart in another. These are precisely the kind of things that we feel
like saying when describing certain intersubjective liaisons between doxastic
contexts. As far as Fred is concerned, the prime minister and the president of
France are one and the same person. Barney knows better: two jobs, two
individuals. Barney has two people in mind who correspond with a single
person in Fred's picture of the world: they are counterparts.
According to Lewis, the counterpart relation is a relation of similarity, and
if we assume that it may be any kind of similarity relation, this implies that in
general the counterpart relation is neither symmetric nor transitive (see
Lewis 1968:115-117). 115-117). However, it is fairly clear that, certainly in the case of
the attitudes but presumably in other cases as well, the counterpart relation
cannot be any kind of similarity relation. Barney will say that his notion of
Helmut Kohl and the one entertained by Fred are counterparts, because he
assumes that Kohl a la Fred goes back to the same source as his own Kohl a
la Barney (ct. (cf. Edelberg 1992). It is this type of relation that we typically have
in mind when we consider correspondences between belief states, and this
type of relation is presumably symmetric.
Unlike identity, counterpart relations are indeterminate in various ways.lO
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To say that two individuals are counterparts is to say that they are alike in
some respects, and since similarity is a matter of degree, we have to agree on
a lower bound of similarity before we can decide whether a counterpart
relation obtains in any given case. Furthermore, similarity is a perspectival
notion. Two individuals may be similar in some respects but not in others,
and before we can say that they are counterparts or not we have to decide
what respects are to count.
The convention for encoding counterpart relations that I propose goes as
follows: if a DRS