Intentional Identity and Information Exchange Hob-nob Sentences

\We have intentional identity when a number of people, or one person on diierent occasions, have attitudes with a common focus, whether or not there actually is something at that focus" (Geach 1967, p. 627). In this paper we compare and relate Robert van Rooy's recent analysis of intentional identity descriptions by means of`Hob-Nob sentences', with Paul Dekker's equally recent analysis of cross-speaker anaphora, `Hob-Nob situations' as we will also call them here. Hob-Nob sentences and Hob-Nob situations have been allocated to diierent (sub-)areas of the theory of interpretation, to the semantics of attitude ascriptions, and to the pragmatics of pronominal anaphora, respectively. However, the two are closely related. Hob-Nob situations are most naturally described using Hob-Nob sentences, and Hob-Nob sentences generally describe Hob-Nob situations. A combined account may serve to shed light on the semantics / pragmatics interface, and also on the relation between believing and meaning. This paper thus makes up a concrete case for studying two long-standing philosophical issues which to our opinion are most actual in the area of language and information. A pronoun occurring in the embedded clause of an attitude attribution may have as its syntactic antecedent an indeenite in the embedded clause of an earlier attitude attribution. It is not diicult to represent this in standard logical languages if the indeenite is interpreted de re, but such an indeenite does not always need to be interpreted de re, as is illustrated by Geach's Hob-Nob sentence (1), or, a bit less involved, example (2): (1) Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she (the same witch) killed Cob's sow. (2) Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob thinks she killed Cob's sow. As Geach has pointed out, it is not prima facie obvious how to analyze the (second) attitude ascriptions to Nob. Nob's musings are intended to be about the same 1