Abstract
Observing Clark Kent, so dressed, entering a phone booth and Superman, so dressed, exiting it, most people say (1) is true, (2) false (1) Clark Kent entered the phone booth and Superman came out. (2) Clark Kent entered the phone booth and Clark Kent came out. Why? Some say it’s semantics: the sentences say different things. Others say it’s pragmatics: uses of the sentences (non-semantically) convey different things. Yet others say it’s differing associations speakers make with the sentences. I defend the plausibility of a semantic explanation of our intuitions, arguing that linguistic competence and the meaning it tracks is constituted by something more like a process than a persisting, relatively unvarying state. While it is an empirical matter which explanation is correct, the picture of competence and meaning as things process like is, I argue, preferable to views of them as static.
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