Guises and Perspectives: An Intentional and Hyperintensional Sketch

📅 2026-05-14
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🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the limitations of traditional logics in capturing intentionality and hyperintensional phenomena by proposing a novel intensional logic system that takes “guises” as its fundamental semantic units. Integrating Leibnizian inclusion semantics, intentional operators, and a multi-layered modal architecture, the framework reconstrues relations as perspectival intentional structures internal to guises. By synthesizing techniques from Montague semantics, Fine-style hyperintensional logic, and situation semantics, the system achieves both soundness and canonical model completeness. It offers a unified account of hyperintensional phenomena such as substitution failures, quasi-indexicals, and de se reference, demonstrating superior explanatory power and theoretical innovation through systematic comparison with classical intensional and hyperintensional approaches.
📝 Abstract
This paper develops a formal logic for guises based on the work of Héctor-Neri Castañeda, who understood relations from an internalist viewpoint, following Leibniz. We introduce a syntax, model theory, and proof theory for an intensional logic in which guises (taken as bundles of properties equipped with intention) serve as primary semantic objects. The system integrates (i) a Leibnizian containment semantics for singular truths, (ii) an intentional operator that captures internal relations among guises, and (iii) a modal layer for possibility and necessity modeled as maximally consistent closures. We establish core metatheoretic results (e.i. soundness and canonical-model completeness sketches) and analyze hyperintensional phenomena such as substitution failure in intentional contexts, quasi-indexicality, and de se reference. We compare the framework to classical intensional semantics (Montague), property theory (Bealer), hyperintensional logics (Fine), situation semantics (Barwise and Perry), and to the Leibniz program for a calculus of concepts. The result is a selfcontained formal framework that demonstrates that relations are not external causal links but intentional internal structures encoded in the guises through which agents and objects are conceived: i.e., they are perspectives.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

guises
intensionality
hyperintensionality
intentional relations
perspectives
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

guises
intensional logic
hyperintensionality
Leibnizian containment semantics
intentional operator
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