Modal monsters and talk about fiction (Q928713)

Intensional operators affect the point at which a sentence is to be evaluated. Double-index semantics suggests the possibility of operators which affect rather the context. \textit{D. Kaplan} rejected such operators as Monsters in ``Demonstratives'' [in: J. Almog et al. (eds.), Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 481--563 (1977), p. 510]. Utterance-based semantics also reject them. By an adroit selection of examples concerning the historically inaccurate movie ``Pearl Harbor'', Predelli elegantly shows that a Monstrous operator delivers intuitively correct evaluations in cases in which an intensional operator ``In the world of the movie'' delivers incorrect ones, and also in cases in which a simple context-shift semantics (achieved without operators) delivers incorrect ones. This provides a significant challenge to both Double-Index and Utterance-based semantics.