The Statue and the Alloy
A problem from Kit Fine, "The Non-Identity of a Material Thing and Its Matter", Mind 112 (2003):
Suppose a certain piece of well made alloy coincides with a certain badly made statue. Al makes an inventory of well made things. The only entry on his list is "that piece of alloy". Question: Does the entry on Al's list refer to a badly made thing?
Kit Fine intuits that the answer is definitely "no", irrespective of the context in which that question is asked. From which it seems to follow that the piece of alloy and the statue are not identical. At least I think this is what he thinks would follow. Anyway, here is an extension of the above story where "the entry in Al's list refers to a badly made thing" appears to be true.
Bo wants to check how well her employee Al can distinguish well made from badly made statues. She puts six statues on a shelf (one of them made of alloy) and asks Al to make an inventory of all and only the well-made things on the shelf. Afterwards, she tells her secretary to give all and only the things on Al's list to the local expert on well made statues. The expert receives just a single statue and since he is an expert on these matters, he correctly tells Bo that it is badly made. His judgement wouldn't be correct if the thing he received wasn't badly made. But his judgement is correct. So the thing he received is badly made. But certainly the thing he received is refered to by the entry on Al's list, otherwise the secretary would have made a mistake, which she hasn't.
I don't have a complete theory of how context, rather than the reference of the subject term, determines the relevant interpretation of "well made" (and I agree that none of the dummy theories in Fine's paper look attractive), but I think it clearly does.