Abstract

This chapter defends the view that although the sentence ‘Superman is Clark Kent, but some people who believe that Superman flies do not believe that Clark Kent flies’ is logically inconsistent, we can still utter it, while speaking literally, without asserting anything false. This key to the resolution of the puzzle of substitutivity is the idea that logical inconsistency for sentences which contain multiple context-sensitive expressions merely requires falsity on all uniform interpretations, where uniformity of interpretation requires resolving the context-sensitivity of occurrences of related expressions in parallel ways. A logically inconsistent sentence can thus admit true non-uniform interpretations. Moreover, various factors, including the use of several names for the same thing, can make certain non-uniform interpretations of a sentence easier for us to access than any of its uniform interpretations.