Preparation for 7.March meeting

I slowly worked my way through Fine's "The Problem of De Re Modality" in his Modality and Tense. I wrote a longish exposition of the paper; upshot being that quantification into opaque contexts seems possible as long as a quantified sentence is uniform with its instances. Quantification may be referential or irreferential. If we understand Quine's assertion that sentences which attempt quantification into opaque contexts are unintelligible, as a claim that de dicto readings of such sentences lead to a failure of substitution which in turn causes the quantified sentence not to be uniform with its instances and this in turn causes the quantified sentence to be unintelligible then the assertion can be saved.

I also made a first attempt to see what the implications of Fine's arguments are for Ludwig's assertion that conceptual necessity should be understood as the fundamental sort of necessity. It seems that there may be more to do in this regard.