   Within the orthodox paradigm, an entirely different reaction to the puzzles of intentional inexistence has been to try to clarify the ontological difficulties by ascending to a higher semantic level that can, as Willard Van Orman Quine (1960, 272) says, “carry the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words).” Semantic ascent allows one to rise from talk about things to talk about talk about things, i.e., words. In contemporary analytic philosophy, Roderick Chisholm (1957, 298) was the first to contemplate the formulation of “a working criterion by means of which we can distinguish sentences that are intentional, or are used intentionally, in a certain language from sentences that are not.” The idea is to examine sentences that report intentionality rather than intentionality itself.