Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski

This paper revisits Pietroski's challenge to truth-conditional semantics, focusing on his critique of Davidsonian event semantics in the case of mutual chases, which provide an intriguing exemplification of the complex interaction between logical forms and ambiguous contexts of utterance. Pietroski argues that truth-conditional analyses either collapse into contradiction or demand dubious metaphysical commitments, pushing us instead toward a purely procedural, concept-assembly view of meaning. Building on Quine's "double-vision" puzzle, we defend truth-conditional semantics by introducing the notion of event guises: role-indexed properties of a single complex event. We argue that guises are supported not by subevents or perspectival constructs, but by minimal subsituations in Kratzer's sense, i.e. informational parts of the situation that supports the event. This analysis dissolves apparent contradictions, preserves a lean ontology of events, and accommodates adverbial modification without metaphysical extravagance. The upshot is a hybrid event-situation semantics that shows why logical forms remain robustly truth-conditional, contra Pietroski's skepticism.