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Reference and Persistence

In debates about persistence, advocates of the stage theory claim to give the best account of our intuitions about the truth conditions of many ordinary language sentences. For example, Sider 1996 claims that intuitively there is just one person in my room when I am in my room alone, even in a fission case when I am about to be split into two people. Sider prefers the stage theory to the worm theory because the former accommodates our intuitions about ordinary language judgments like these. In this paper, I argue against versions of the stage theory and in favor of an alternative theory of counting sentences. In §1, I present the stage theory and discuss a problem for the theory acknowledged by Sider. In response to this problem, Sider defends a modified stage theory in Sider 1996 and Sider 2001. In §2, I argue that even the modified stage theory yields unintuitive verdicts about counting sentences. The problem I introduce for the modified stage theory naturally suggests an alternative theory of persistence, one that closely resembles current formal semantic theories of certain readings of counting sentences. In §2, I introduce the formal semantics of “event-related” readings of counting sentences proposed by Barker 1999 and Barker 2008. I compare this semantics with an unpublished theory of persistence proposed by Sider 2009 in response to my argument against the modified stage theory. According to this perspective theory of persistence, we do not talk only about short-lived stages or extended worms, but about temporal segments of objects whose length is fixed by our context of utterance. In §3, I argue that a suitably modified version of the perspective theory proposed by Sider can account for a number of our intuitions about counting sentences. The perspective theory is a natural recourse for any former advocate of the modified stage theory. However, despite its successes, the perspective theory carries significant disadvantages. In §4, I present some challenges for the perspective theory. In response to these challenges, I defend an error theory of our ordinary language