A Montagovian Version of Kaplan’s Frege-Churches

Abstract

This paper compares two approaches to intensionality within possible-worlds semantics between which Montague seems to have wavered: Frege’s distinction between extensional and intensional environments and Russell’s one-layered proposition-based account. It is shown that the Fregean framework can be embedded within the more restrictive Russelllian ontology by a variation of David Kaplan’s Russelling construction that is fully definable in Montague’s intensional type logic and lends itself to compositional semantic analysis.