egregious violations of closure that no one could welcome. I might be sensitive to whether there is a red barn before me—the nearest alternative is a green one—while insensitive to whether there’s a barn—the nearest alternative is a convincing red fake. Surely to know it’s a red barn, I must know it’s a barn.

Kripke relies here on the idea, implicit in closest-world accounts of counterfactuals, that $\neg(A\&B) \Box\!\rightarrow C$ reduces to $\neg A \Box\!\rightarrow C$, if it is easier for $A$ to fail than $B$. To the naive ear, however, \emph{Without both parents’ consent, Billy wouldn’t be allowed on the plane} says more than \emph{Without Mom’s consent, Billy wouldn’t be allowed on the plane}, even if Mom’s approval is harder to get. Dad has got to consent, too. Read the same way, \emph{Had it not been a red barn, I would have noticed} requires both that I would have noticed, had it not been red, and that I would have noticed, had it not been a barn. My red-barn belief does not constitute knowledge on this reading, since I would \emph{not} have noticed, were it not a barn. The stronger reading may not be mandatory, but it is there, and available for use in a Nozick-like theory that is vulnerable only to all of Kripke’s other objections.\footnote{There is a huge literature on this, much of it seeking to explain the strong reading away. See Fine on the ``wayward character of counterfactuals'' \cite{Fine_2012}, 42.}

The lectern, recall, has got to be made of wood. Do we understand what it means for a thing to be essentially wooden? Kripke does battle with Quine on this. \emph{De re} necessity is intelligible, Quine maintains, only if it is reducible to \emph{de dicto}. Quine attempts a reduction (maybe we should say, he pretends to attempt one) via the unrestricted modal exportation principle

\[
(\text{MEP})\quad x \text{ is necessarily } G \text{ iff, for some } F \text{ satisfied only by } x, \text{ the } F \text{ is necessarily } G.
\]

(MEP) lands us in contradictions, however. Obama \emph{qua} President is necessarily American-born, but there is no such requirement on Ann Dunham’s oldest son. Kripke is not much bothered by this. He has no more use for (MEP) than Quine. But what he \emph{mainly} rejects is the idea that a bridge principle is needed. \emph{De re} necessity can stand on its own.

This whole dialectic is replayed in \emph{Troubles} in a doxastic key. \emph{De re} belief ought to be grounded in \emph{de dicto}, one may think. A discerning bridge principle proves impossible to formulate, however, and we are driven to

\[
(\text{DEP})\quad S \text{ believes } x \text{ is } G \text{ iff, for some } F \text{ satisfied only by } x, S \text{ believes the } F \text{ is } G.
\]

Unrestricted doxastic exportation may not land us precisely in contradictions. But it obliterates the very distinction at issue. It was supposed to be only his Russian handlers who believed Burgess to be a spy. To go by (DEP), though, Hoover believed it too, by believing that the hardest-drinking spy was a spy, when that title was held by Burgess. It gets worse: Hoover thought that he himself was a Russian spy, indeed, that he was Ethel Rosenberg. For let $p$ be some randomly chosen false belief of Hoover’s, say, that America was on the brink of collapse. Hoover held that (the $x$) [$x$ = Hoover if $p$, otherwise $x$ =