Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on April 10, 2006
Journal of Semantics 2006 23(3):217-250; doi:10.1093/jos/ffl002
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Epistemic Determiners
ENS–LSH Lyon
Université Paris VII
Correspondence: JACQUES JAYEZ ENS-LSH, 15, Parvis René Descartes, BP 7000, 69342 Lyon, France, jjayez{at}ens-lsh.fr
Correspondence: LUCIA M. TOVENA UFR Linguistique, Case 7031, 2, Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France, tovena{at}linguist.jussieu.fr
The present paper offers a contrastive examination of French items that require some knowledge of the speaker and items that require some ignorance. We relate this difference in a systematic way to the well–known problem of ‘identifiability’ in epistemic logic. In addition to providing a more precise analysis, this identification-based investigation leads us to two findings. First, non-identification (‘ignorance’) is actually a particular manifestation of the more general phenomenon of free-choiceness, which has received much attention lately. Studying non-identification helps us to gain a better understanding of the varieties of free-choiceness. Second, identification (‘knowledge’) has to be distinguished from specificity, understood as wide scope of an existential quantifier, and to be evaluated in the perspective of a full-fledged epistemic theory including epistemic agents and descriptions. This questions the scope-based analyses of determiners like un certain in French and a certain in English and gives a central place to the phenomenon of relativity of description, whose importance is independently motivated in recent work on reference.