Reference

‘What are you talking about?’ This is, in a sense, the animating question of philosophy of language. Or at least it was at the start of the 20th century. Times change, and interest in this question has perhaps faded. Still, it remains. And now we have a new attempt to answer it, in the form of Elmar Unnsteinnson's Talking About.

In the article, I discuss a form of semantic variance in singular terms and concepts that has been largely overlooked in current debates. I call this phenomenon aboutness-fragility: according to certain theories of reference that allow for reference failure, a singular thought <α is Φ> (or its verbal report `α is Φ') formed by uptaking some selected informational stream may refer to an object in the actual circumstance of thought formation, yet fail to do so in nearby scenarios where the (...) informational stream remains unchanged. I identify some theories which are open to aboutness-fragility, and examine its implications. In particular, I argue that any theory allowing aboutness-fragility must be revised to prevent it, since the phenomenon disrupts the tight connection between reference, knowledge-transmission, and communication. To offer a case study, I focus on Imogen Dickie's theory of reference for proper names (Dickie (2015)), which holds that proper-name aboutness-relations are context-sensitive and depend on an agent's contextually variable activity of filtering information. In this regard, I show that, when this context sensitivity is pushed to its limits, it yields aboutness-fragility. I conclude that Dickie's account — like any theory open to this phenomenon — requires revision. (shrink)

Bernard Williams’ Truth and Truthfulness responds to modern scepticism about Capital-T Truth by relocating truth from metaphysical guarantee to ethical practice, grounded in the virtues of Accuracy and Sincerity. While this move has been widely accepted, it leaves a further assumption largely untouched: that facts provide a neutral and unmediated substitute for truth once metaphysical certainty is abandoned. -/- This essay challenges that assumption. Drawing on a mediated encounter ontology and a mundane analogy from classical physics, it argues that facts, (...) no less than truth, are not given directly but stabilised under constraint through practices of measurement, categorisation, and institutional agreement. Objectivity does not require immediacy; it requires convergence across independently mediated encounters. -/- Treating facts as unmediated encourages the conflation of linguistic and institutional representations with reality itself, displaces epistemic responsibility, and moralises disagreement—particularly in jurisprudence and public discourse. Extending Williams’ project, the essay defends a conception of truthfulness without innocence: a commitment to reality that rejects both metaphysical guarantees and the false comfort of unexamined facthood. (shrink)

Philosophers have paid more attention to proper names (hereafter “names”) than to any other semantic kind. They have also more often focused on names in works of fact than in fiction, and almost always considered individual works, fact or fiction, in isolation from one another. Though serial fiction, which requires considering them not in isolation but in combination, is an extremely common use of language, it is understudied, presenting new challenges to semantic theories. This article proposes a novel account of (...) the semantics of names, called “semantic dualism,” motivated by serial fiction with lessons also for serial fact. According to semantic dualism, the reference of names is in some contexts mediated and in others is not. Those contexts involve how names are used serially across different works. Given semantic dualism's novelty, this article is programmatic, aiming to establish that semantic dualism warrants further investigation. (shrink)

What is the meaning of ‘cow’ in a sentence like “Nala is bringing one cow”? Does ‘meaning’ encompass the reference within a specific context or what a competent language user comprehends across various contexts? This paper reconstructs and evaluates the debate between Gaṅgeśa (a 14th-century Nyāya philosopher) and the Prābhākaras regarding their responses to these questions as presented in Gaṅgeśa’s The Jewel of Reflection on the Nature of Things (Tattvacintāmaṇi). Gaṅgeśa defends a two-level semantic account involving contextual meaning and general (...) meaning: the meaning of ‘cow’ in a context where Nala is bringing Betsy is Betsy characterized by cowness, while the general meaning of ‘cow’ that remains consistent across contexts is an underspecified individual characterized by cowness. In contrast, the Prābhākaras maintain that ‘cow’ means solely cowness, irrespective of context. I argue that the Prābhākaras and Gaṅgeśa’s accounts converge functionally in requiring both universal and individual aspects, revealing a tension inherent to what I call ‘entity-based theories’—theories of meaning that attempt to maintain alignment between cognitive content and references across contexts. Their crucial divergence regarding where to draw the boundary of word meaning proper stems not only from semantic considerations, but also from competing priorities concerning verbal utterances as a source of knowledge. (shrink)

We can know the past by accurately remembering events we experienced. Yet whether a memory accurately represents a past event depends on whether the memory successfully refers to the event. How do memories refer to their objects? One answer to this question falls neatly out of traditional causal theories of memory: reference is secured by a causal link, sustained through a memory trace. However, recent advances in memory science suggest that remembering is an inherently constructive rather than preservative process. Motivated (...) by these empirical findings, the new philosophical paradigm treats remembering as a species of constructive imagining. This paper raises a novel challenge for the most influential representative of the constructivist paradigm: simulation theory. The challenge is to explain how remembering, so understood, could secure the right referential link to past events. It argues that simulation is unable to perform the reference-fixing role previously assigned to memory traces. In dropping the causal condition on remembering, simulationism has no viable route to explaining memory-based reference to, and therefore knowledge of, the past. (shrink)

Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the expression ‘talk about’. Interestingly, although ‘about’ plays a prominent part in the debate, aboutness has not been a topic. This paper discusses this aspect. Alas, it must thereby add a further ambiguity to the list, the ambiguity between aboutness and reference, and thus also between subject matter and referent. It explains the distinction between intra-categorical aboutness which makes no ontological demands, and cross-categorical reference which requires (...) the referent to exist. It then analyses the 4-fold embedding contained in Machery et al.’s study and shows how the aboutness-reference distinction bears on it. (shrink)

This study undertakes a philosophical examination of the nature and function of names within the broader ontology of identity. It seeks to discern whether a name possesses any intrinsic power to confer identity upon a being, or whether it merely participates in the cluster of descriptions belonging to that being. Through an analytical engagement with the historical lineage of name theory, this inquiry traces the persistent tension between naturalism and conventionalism, between descriptive and causal accounts of reference. The paper argues (...) that the true ground of identification lies neither in the arbitrary sound of a name nor in the historical chain of its transmission, but within the totality of descriptive attributes that constitute the being’s cluster. In this light, names are revealed as instruments of reference rather than bearers of essence, their authority deriving from the living nexus of properties and relations that endow an entity with its distinct intelligibility. Thus, the investigation advances an ontological account in which naming is seen not as the origin of identity, but as its linguistic reflection within the order of being. (shrink)

A dilemma concerning reference is posed: on the one hand it seems essential, if we are to give an account of truth, to first give an account of reference. On the other hand, reference is more remote than truth from the evidence in behavior on which a radical theory of language must depend, since words refer only in the context of sentences, and it is sentences which are needed to promote human purposes. The solution which is proposed is to treat (...) reference as a theoretical construct whose sole function is to serve a theory of truth. Since more than one relation between words and objects will serve a theory of truth equally well, this amounts to giving up the concept of reference as basic. (shrink)

Der Beitrag konzentriert sich auf die Entwicklung dreier verschränkter Thesen: 1. Ein zentraler Baustein der Phänomenologie als Methode besteht in einem verbalen Zeigen auf Phänomene, die den Adressierten vorprädikativ oder präreflexiv bereits vertraut sind. Phänomenologie ist verbal vermitteltes Sehenlassen präreflexiver Phänomene. 2. Die uns in der Erfahrung gegebenen Phänomene (etwa Situationen, Ereignisse, Dinge) lassen sich selbst als ‚Hinweissysteme, Strahlensysteme von Hinweisen‘ (Husserl) explizieren. Phänomene zeigen innenhorizontal auf naheliegende Möglichkeiten von Erfahrungsverläufen, die jeweilige Art dieses Zeigens ist ihre Gegebenheitsweise. 3. Der (...) erlebte Wirklichkeitscharakter von Phänomenen korreliert mit dem Grad ihrer einstimmigen Bewährung im zeitlichen Verlauf der Erfahrung. Daher können uns auch virtuelle Situationen und Entitäten in gewöhnlichem Sinn als wirklich gegeben sein. (shrink)

In some cases of communication, the hearer misunderstands the referential part of the speaker's utterance although she identifies the speaker's referent. What more is needed for referential understanding? One view is that the hearer must know what the speaker refers to. Against this view, this article argues that knowledge of reference is not necessary for referential understanding, because of differences between understanding and knowledge in the tolerance of luck. Whereas both referential understanding and knowledge are incompatible with one type of (...) luck—intervening luck—referential understanding is less sensitive than knowledge to another type of luck—environmental luck. (shrink)

On one way of interpreting it, Arthur Prior's “Thank Goodness That's Over” argument aims to establish the truth of tense realism on the basis of two key assumptions: that tensed relief requires tensed propositions and that tensed propositions require tensed facts. Relativists (like Lewis) and absolutists (like Perry) agree that Prior's argument can be resisted but disagree on which of the two assumptions should be denied. In this paper, I use a thought experiment to argue that Absolutism does not allow (...) us to make intelligible sense of tensed relief. This is a serious problem for the credibility of this approach as a response to Prior's argument but also, potentially, as an account “perspectival” attitudes other than tensed relief. (shrink)

What is involved in having a singular thought about an ordinary object? On the leading epistemic view, one has this capacity if and only if one has belief-forming dispositions which would reliably enable one to get its properties right (Dickie, 2015). I first argue that Dickie’s official view entails surprising and unpalatable claims about either rationality or singular thought, before offering a precisification. Once we have reached that level of abstraction, it becomes difficult to see what is distinctively epistemic about (...) the framework. If we are to tease out the delicate connection between singular thought and knowledge, we should suspend the assumption that there is a homogeneous core, present in all cases of such thought, and that it is from there that its (univocal) epistemic character derives. (shrink)

From “Is Semantics Possible?” (1970) to his seminal work “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975), Hilary Putnam developed his semantic externalism about the meaning and reference of natural kind terms. His metasemantic position, especially his idea of ‘indexicality’, is typically interpreted as a form of physical externalism. Such a view is committed to both natural kind realism (as a basis for reference determination) and causal-historical chains (as a basis for reference preservation). I contend that this interpretation requires reconsideration. Some scholars have (...) presented textual evidence that Putnam did not presuppose natural kind realism when he developed his metasemantic position during the relevant period. Nonetheless, the question of how Putnam’s semantic externalism should be reformulated remains open. In this paper, I reconstruct his metasemantic position as what I term convergent externalism. On this account, the diachronic identity of reference is both guided by norms inherent to our linguistic practices and retroactively secured. While Putnam revised his general philosophical views throughout his career, my thesis demonstrates that the metasemantic and epistemological foundations of his thought were more unified than is often recognized. (shrink)

Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of meaning, the relationship of language to reality, and the ways in which we use, learn, and understand language. _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language _provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field, charting its key ideas and movements, and addressing contemporary research and enduring questions in the philosophy of language. Unique to this _Companion _is clear coverage of research from the related disciplines of formal logic (...) and linguistics, and discussion of the applications in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of mind. Organized thematically, the _Companion _is divided into seven sections: Core Topics; Foundations of Semantics; Parts of Speech; Methodology; Logic for Philosophers of Language; Philosophy of Language for the Rest of Philosophy; and Historical Perspectives. Comprised of 70 never-before-published essays from leading scholars--including Sally Haslanger, Jeffrey King, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Rae Langton, Kit Fine, John MacFarlane, Jeff Pelletier, Scott Soames, Jason Stanley, Stephen Stich and Zoltan Gendler Szabo--the _Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language_ promises to be the most comprehensive and authoritative resource for students and scholars alike. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Saul Kripke’s theory of rigid designation and a posteriori necessity through the lens of Karl Popper’s falsificationist methodology. The analysis reveals that Kripke’s arguments conflate nomological impossibility (contingent scientific laws) with metaphysical necessity, committing a modal scope fallacy. By dissecting Kripke’s examples—such as rigid designators for singular terms ( this table, Elizabeth’s parents ) and universal terms ( heat is molecular motion, water is H₂O )—we demonstrate that his claims of necessary truths rely on implicit empirical (...) generalizations rather than essentialist metaphysics. Key objections include: 1. The Nomological Fallacy: Kripke mistakes contingent biological/physical laws (e.g., "humans have exactly two parents") for necessary truths, ignoring Popper’s distinction between falsifiable laws and metaphysical necessity. 2. Verbalism in Essentialism: Questions like "What is heat?" are definitional, not ontological; Kripke’s "necessary a posteriori truths" collapse into tautologies when stripped of redundant terminology. 3. Misapplied Modal Logic: Kripke’s inference from "law L prohibits X " to " X is metaphysically impossible" is invalid—a confusion of empirical regularity with logical necessity. The paper concludes that rigid designation, divorced from essentialism, reduces to trivial indexicality (e.g., "water" means H₂O on Earth but H₂SO₄ on Twin Earth), rendering the theory empirically vacuous. Kripke’s framework, while influential, ultimately rests on a category error corrected by Popper’s emphasis on contingent, falsifiable laws over metaphysical finality. (shrink)

By integrating Bernard Williams’ internalism about reasons with his later thought, this article casts fresh light on internalism and reveals what wider concerns it speaks to. To be consistent with Williams’ later work, I argue, internalism must align with his deference to the phenomenology of moral deliberation and with his critique of ‘moral self-indulgence’. Key to this alignment is the idea that deliberation can express the agent's motivations without referring to them; and that internalism is not a normative claim, but (...) an example of sense-making from ‘the ethnographic stance’. This leaves a worry over whether moral conviction can coexist with an internalist understanding of reasons. Here too, however, Williams’ later thought provides an answer. Differentiating corrosive from corroborative sense-making, it elucidates how internalism, though not normative, can nonetheless affect our confidence in reason statements, thereby informing how we deliberate and how we address those whose motivations differ from our own. (shrink)

About two years ago, while I was engaged with various areas of philosophy, I unexpectedly encountered the philosophy of language. This encounter led me to immerse myself deeply in its foundational problems. Throughout this process, I primarily worked with original texts, but I did not limit myself to them; I also engaged carefully with secondary sources. While reading secondary literature, I came to a striking realization: many introductory books on the philosophy of language did not truly serve as “introductions.” In (...) particular, works by Michael Morris and Scott Soames—often read at the introductory or fundamental level—did not, in my view, adequately guide new readers into the subject. On the other hand, the most accessible book I came across was Colin McGinn’s. Yet, despite its simplicity, it occasionally overwhelmed the reader with scattered or unnecessary material. I do not question the intellectual quality of these works. Rather, I wish to emphasize that they do not fully succeed in fulfilling their introductory aims. Seeing this gap, I chose not to write a general introduction to the philosophy of language. Instead, I decided to focus on a single, central problem and explore it in depth. (shrink)

Generics, general statements about categories, are believed to transmit essentialist beliefs--the idea that things have a hidden true nature. Research suggests that people essentialize natural (biological and non-living) and social kinds, but not artifacts. Previous studies using small datasets found that generics are often used to describe animate beings in speech to children. Using a larger corpus of children's books and parent speech, we examined a wider range of kinds and generalizing statements (including habituals and universals). Our results show that (...) generics are more likely used for biological kinds than artifacts and that their use increases in parent speech as children age. However, generics weren't more likely used for non-living or social kinds than artifacts. Habituals, at least in speech, were more likely used for social kinds than artifacts. Generalizing statements were more likely used for about non-living natural kinds than artifacts. These findings inform the debate over whether generics transmit essentialist beliefs. (shrink)

Responsibility requires causation. But there are different kinds of causes. Some are connected to their effects; others are disconnected. We ask how children's developing ability to distinguish causes relates to their understanding of moral responsibility. We found in Experiment 1 that when Andy hits Suzy with his bike, she falls into a fence and it breaks, 3-year-old children treated "caused", "break" and "fault" as referring to the direct cause, Suzy. By 4, they differentiated causes: Andy "caused" the fence to break, (...) it's his "fault", but Suzy "broke" it. We found in Experiment 2 that when the chain involved disconnection, 3-year-olds focused only on the direct cause. Around 5 they distinguished causes, saying that the disconnecting cause "caused" an object to break, it’s their "fault", but the direct cause "broke" it. Our findings relate to the outcome-to-intention shift in moral responsibility and suggest a more fundamental shift in children's understanding of causation. (shrink)

In questo saggio critico la rigida distinzione tra due diversi Wittgenstein, mostrando come il suo pensiero sia in continua transizione. In particolare mostro come, attraverso un costante ripensamento del concetto di forma, Wittgenstein giunga a identificare il significato delle parole con il loro uso nelle nostre pratiche linguistiche.

An intentional fallacy is committed when one sets the goal of getting to the author’s intention. In this paper, I restore authorial authority, through proposing a situational hermeneutic. It obligates, when engaging with a text, stepping into the author’s shoes. Instead of focusing only on the ideas of the author, I emphasise the importance of knowing how the text relates to the author’s world through identifying the referents. This priority of reference over meaning resonates with Chad Hansen’s black-box analogy in (...) contravention of Eurocentrism, which focuses on the mentality of the author. I develop an externalism from his apparent linguistic behaviourism, by bringing out the mental element, referential intention, in my pragmatic theory. I will argue for the importance of knowledge of situation of the author in doing hermeneutics, with the Daodejing as an example. (shrink)

Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language (1937) contains an unfortunate passage, the ‘Babylon passage’, explaining what it is for a linguistic expression to be about a subject matter. Past criticism has only addressed Carnap's mistaken claim that the occurrence of a denoting term is necessary and sufficient for a linguistic expression to be about the denotatum. But the passage contains further problems: a form‐object confusion due to the ambiguity of ‘lecture’; a use‐mention problem with the word ‘Babylon’; and finally, the fact (...) that its key sentence S1 is a counterexample to Carnap's own definition of aboutness. These flaws notwithstanding, the passage's ‘non‐formal consideration’ that a statement's truth or falsity should matter to our knowledge about the subject matter's properties, is an important contribution to aboutness theory. This paper discusses all these pros and cons of the passage in depth with a view to their consequences for current work on subject matter. (shrink)

Reference is a relation that obtains between a variety of representational tokens and objects or properties. For instance, when I assert that “Barack Obama is a Democrat,” I use a particular sort of representational token—i.e. the name ‘Barack Obama’—which refers to a particular individual—i.e. Barack Obama. While names and other referential terms are hardly the only type of representational token capable of referring (consider, for instance, concepts, mental maps, and pictures), linguistic tokens like these have long stood at the center (...) of philosophical inquiries into the nature of reference. Accordingly, and to keep things to a reasonable length, this entry will focus primarily on linguistic reference. Assuming that at least some token linguistic expressions really do refer, a number of interesting questions arise. How, for example, does linguistic reference relate to the act of referring—something that we as speakers do with referential terms? How exactly do referential terms come to refer? That is, in virtue of what do they refer to what they do? Is there a single answer to this question, a single mechanism of reference, or different answers depending on the sort of term in question—or even the circumstances in which a single term is used? And what exactly is the relationship between reference and meaning? Answers to these various questions will turn out to be closely related, and the task of this entry will be to trace out some of the main clusters of answers. (shrink)

In the context of Kripke's puzzle, Paderewski-the-pianist and Paderewski-the-politician are the same object but belong to two different semiotic systems. Their respective tokenings in thought or language are based on two informational contents which are caused by the same object but emitted through two distinct causal pathways. Relativization of the object to the two semiotic systems represent elements of a set of ___coreferential homonyms___. Every F is an F = Everything X that is conspicuously or demonstratively an F is something (...) XX which is systematically or descriptively an F. Although bearing distinct meanings, X is the same as XX. (shrink)

‘Pencil’, ‘Tiger’, ‘Christianity’. What kind of reference (if any) do these terms have? Do they have the same semantics? In his celebrated The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ (1975), Hilary Putnam suggests so when arguing that they have externalist semantics. However, this claim is highly controversial. A lengthy discussion has been going on the matter. So far, neither Putnam’s nor other defenses of Externalism proposed within this debate have actually succeeded in showing that the terms at stake (and their likes) are semantically (...) on a par. Here I examine further options left to the externalist. I conclude that, still, none is a viable alternative for defending that Externalism applies to the mentioned terms (and their likes). (shrink)

Metasemantics studies the foundations of meaning, asking what makes it the case that certain words have the meanings that they do. But what makes metasemantic theories true? This question has been all but ignored in philosophy of language. In this book, we address this issue and argue that just as in metasemantics, both internalist and externalist answers are available for this foundational question. In the book, we introduce and defend _meta-internalism_, arguing that the foundations of reference and meaning are anchored (...) in the individual dispositions and psychological states of language users, offering an alternative to meta-externalist views that would appeal to broader community-based or otherwise external factors. Meta-internalism is, moreover, compatible with semantic externalism as usually understood, and provides an _explanation_ of why externalism is true. Through a critical examination of prominent theories and thought experiments, the book explores fundamental issues like reference failure, conceptual engineering, and the metaphysical implications of reference, as well as the methodology of theories of reference. (shrink)

This article examines the evolution of the concept of existence in modern visual representation and reasoning, highlighting important milestones. In the late eighteenth century, during the so-called golden age of visual reasoning, nominalism reigned supreme and there was limited scope for existential import or individuals in logic diagrams. By the late nineteenth century, a form of realism had taken hold, whose existential commitments continue to dominate many areas in logic and visual reasoning to this day. Physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and linguistic (...) positions underlie both nominalist and realist views. Since the paradigmatic works on visual reasoning in the 1990s, formal diagram systems have been developed that revive either the nominalist or realist perspectives. Unlike in the nineteenth century, these are not motivated by philosophical views. Nevertheless, they may still have an impact on many areas of philosophy and science outside logic. (shrink)

Two recent experimental studies, by Shaun Nichols et al. and by Michael Devitt & Brian Porter claim to find evidence for the view that both causal-historical factors and descriptive factors play a role in determining the extensions of natural kind terms. Both studies use versions of a vignette featuring the fictional natural kind term “Catoblepas”. We conducted an experiment where we used vignettes and corresponding tasks that were otherwise fully analogous, but featured terms which are not natural kind terms. We (...) found that such terms received the same patterns of response which Nichols et al. and Devitt & Porter took to justify their conclusions. We conclude that either the kind of view they arrive at applies more widely than just for natural kind terms or, as we think is more likely, the original results do not support such a two-factor view in the first place. (shrink)

This is a review of Jessica Keiser’s Non-Ideal Foundations of Language.

It doesn’t have (just) one, and this matters for how we ought to pursue a theory of meaning and communication.

A truism: a name that is essentially associated with a description—so that its description contributes to the psychological explanations in which it figures—refers not to its referent simpliciter but to its referent relative to the information that is mirrored by the description.

Understanding the Human TimeSpace. Why humans cry out (eventually): I need my space!

To become a public figure or celebrity, I claim, is to exist alongside a zombie version of yourself. This zombie shares the same name and physical likeness but operates independently of its flesh-and-blood counterpart. In fact, public figures do not have any special authority over the zombie version of themselves, and in some contexts, they enjoy less authority over their zombie counterparts than others do. In the US, for example, public figures are not legally entitled to protections against criticism via (...) parody, which can include unauthorized use of their likeness for offensive images, insulting jokes, and other forms of public mockery. As Michel Foucault observed, a work is entitled to become the “murderer” of its author, which suggests that the author’s name exists among the living dead. An artist’s works can bear their name yet operate independently of their attitudes or mental states. In June of 2019, the master rights to Taylor Swift’s first six albums were sold without her knowledge or consent, effectively “murdering” her rights as their author. Swift’s 2019 decision to re-record her first six studio albums can thus be understood as an act of institutional revenge, a way to get back at the people who have wielded power over her and the institutions that enable exploitation—a battle with her zombified works: the “stolen” original albums. In this chapter I sketch an institutional theory of celebrity names to explain the institutional, personal, and political significance of self-appropriation, using Taylor Swift’s act of re-recording her own music as a paradigm case. (shrink)

There is an important difference between a thought that is directed towards a particular object and a thought that is not so directed. For example, there is a difference in my thoughts about my brother, and my thoughts about brothers, more generally. The first has the earmarks of singular thought, while the latter does not. After showing that there is no agreement about the nature of singular thought, I revisit early Russell to find greater clarity. I then advance a version (...) of Millianism that builds on early Russell’s view of singular thought. I argue that the advocates of the direct reference view who argue that being on the receiving end of a name is suffi cient for having singular thoughts about the object named have not provided good reasons for their views. Passing on a name can provide the recipient with a general understanding of the name, but not specific understanding. That is, when acquiring the name, the recipient may not learn the identity of the object named as this very object which, I argue, is required for one having singular thoughts of that object. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman’s paper ‘About’ (1961) was a milestone in aboutness theory. Although it has been much discussed, an interesting fact about it has so far been completely ignored: the important debt it owes to two papers it cites by Gilbert Ryle. With Ryle’s ‘About’ (1933) it shares much more than the title – it, too, offers a three-fold account of different ways a sentence can relate to a subject matter and a separate account for fictitious objects. More importantly, although Goodman’s (...) approach is quite different, the inspiration for the crucial element in his account, ‘differential consequence’, may well have come from a parenthetical suggestion of entailment in Ryle’s ‘About’. The second essential tool Goodman uses, viz. compound predicates which incorporate the (fictitious) object, is also the crucial element in Ryle’s ‘Imaginary Objects’ (also 1933). Goodman turns them into a predicate schema for fictitious subject matters as well as for a nominalist version of his account. (shrink)

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to (...) take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that proper names serve as anchors identifying the individuals in the possible or real world. This hypothesis is tested on Old Icelandic narratives. A prominent feature of Old Icelandic sagas is that the narrative matter is not quite new. A Saga is reliable iff it refers to the events relevant for its audience and accepted as true by the whole community. I argue that proper names must be regarded as references to the background knowledge of (...) the medieval audience. I follow two contemporary Sagas based on the fresh events and show that proper names in a Saga mind were arranged in form of a database, each type of a personal designation having its charachteristic text-building profile. The form of the name and its frequency in the Saga are linked with the rank of the character. The high number of people mentioned in the Sagas is explained by the fact that the Sagas aimed at describing the real world, where the names of the individuals and the events they were involved cross-identified each other. Every character had its rigid identifiers. The total amount of propria is always higher than the number of active figures. I classify the Saga characters into five ranks and discuss their information-structural profiles. (shrink)

Keith Donnellan’s distinction between the attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions has spurred debates regarding the truth conditions of the utterance “the F is G” with definite descriptions used referentially. In this article, I present a semantic account of referential descriptions, grounded in the contextual factors of the utterance, including the speaker’s intention and presupposition as well as the interlocutor’s recognition of them. This account is called the IPR-semantic account, according to which the speaker’s intention (I), presupposition (P), and (...) the interlocutor's recognition (R) jointly determine whether “the F” in an utterance “the F is G” is used referentially or attributively, and the meaning of “the F” is determined by whether it is used referentially or attributively. Moreover, I argue that the meaning of the referential description “the F” is the intended object e, embodied with a property H that has prompted the speaker to presuppose that e is F and to intend to use “the F” to refer to e, as well as the interlocutor to recognize the presupposition and intention. According to the IPR-semantic account, the utterance “the F is G” with “the F” used referentially expresses a singular proposition, namely, that e is G, and it is true if and only if the intended object e is G. Additionally, I argue that the IPR-semantic account not only surpasses some alternative semantic accounts but also outperforms Kripke’s pragmatic account. (shrink)

According to a family of metasemantics for demonstratives called intentionalism, the intentions of speakers determine the reference of demonstratives. And according to a sub-family I call proximal intentions (PI) intentionalism, the intention that determines reference is one that occupies a certain place—the proximal one—in a structure of intentions. PI intentionalism is thought to make correct predictions about reference where less sophisticated forms of intentionalism make the wrong predictions. In this article I argue that this is an illusion: PI intentionalism also (...) suffers from predictive inadequacy. In Sect. 1, I present the problem of predictive inadequacy for intentionalism and an ad hoc response to it. In Sect. 2, I sketch a version of PI intentionalism that aims to provide the most principled response to this problem. In Sect. 3, I explain why PI intentionalism cannot solve the problem after all. In Sect. 4, I indicate where I think metasemanticists should go next. (shrink)

This is a work in the philosophy of language and metasemantics. Its purpose is to help answer the question about how words acquire their meanings. The work is divided into two parts. The purpose of Part One is to defend the claim that, despite numerous attempts, the so-called Kripkenstein’s sceptical challenge, and especially the problem of finitude, has not been offered a successful straight solution. The purpose of Part Two is to critically examine Robert Brandom’s philosophy, which can be treated (...) as an answer to the sceptical challenge in my interpretation. My main claim is that although Brandom’s so-called normativist approach does provide a principled solution to the sceptical challenge, the proposal faces a host of other problems in the light of which I reject it. -/- What is Kripkenstein’s sceptical challenge? The name 'Kripkenstein' is an abbreviation used in the literature for Saul Kripke’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later works, published in 1982. In the long essay, Kripke presents (that Wittgenstein presented) a sceptical challenge that demands an explanation of how any word can have a determinate meaning. The challenge is usually thought to consist of three interrelated problems: (1) the problem of finitude, (2) the problem of error, and (3) the problem of normativity. Following Martin Kusch, I view the problem of finitude as the most important one. According to the problem, briefly, since any actual subject is a finite being, i.e. capable of exhibiting only finite expressions of linguistic signs, it will always be possible to ask whether, in a given context, she is following a rule S1 or rule S2 that corresponds to the meaning of the sign. For example, supposing that the sign in question is '+', it can be asked whether the subject in a given context has followed the addition rule or an alternative quaddition rule, according to which any addition problem exceeding certain arbitrary cardinality results in five. According to the hypothesis, the actual use of '+' by any speaker is compatible with both rules. Since any speaker has only finite dispositions to the mathematical conduct, there will always be some limit after which there is no fact of the matter, according to the sceptic, which rule the subject will have turned out to have followed. Hence, it is indeterminate whether any actual subject has ever calculated according to the addition rule or the quaddition rule. -/- From my view, despite the work of Kripke and Kusch, the problem of finitude has not been taken as seriously as it ought to have been. This in turn has significant consequences for the metasemantic theory concerning the origin and nature of meaning. In particular, I claim that the way how the meaning of words is determined must be understood as temporal in nature. Moreover, I claim that Kripke’s causal-historical account of reference can work as a non-straight solution to the challenge that explains how at least the meanings of some words can be temporally determined. -/- One central aim of Brandom’s philosophy is to give a straight answer to the problem of finitude by providing an answer to the problem of normativity. However, I claim that Brandom’s version of the 'normativity of meaning' hypothesis cannot work as he intends. The key issues are difficult to summarise, but to put it succinctly, the crucial problem concerns Brandom’s ambition to give an answer to a version of Agrippa’s trilemma, or how a chain of justifications can end in anything else than (i) premises that have already been used, (ii) a primitive premise, or an (iii) infinitude of premises. My claim is that Brandom’s resolution to the trilemma is not sound. (shrink)

In the last century, philosophers turned their attention to language. One place they have looked for clues about its nature is Plato’s Cratylus, which considers whether names are naturally or conventionally correct. The dialogue is a source of annoyance to many commentators because it does not take a clear position on the central question. At times, it argues that language is conventional, and, at other times, defends the view that language is natural. This lack of commitment has led to a (...) longstanding dispute over the outcome of the dialogue. I argue that the Cratylus provides no clear resolution to this problem because it presupposes certain unexamined metaphysical commitments about the nature of reality, which are in need of thorough investigation. (shrink)

According to Goodman, a quotation can be treated as a predicate that applies to concrete inscriptions/utterances. Following this approach, Scheffler proposed an inscriptional analysis of direct and indirect speech. An improved version of inscriptionalism will be proposed in this chapter and extended to mixed quotation, that is, to what at first glance appears to be a derivative hybrid case of reporting speech that features a combination of direct and indirect verbal forms. An alternative view of mixed quotation as primary verbal (...) form for reporting speech will be proposed, in virtue of which a unified inscriptional account for reporting speeches will be given. (shrink)

Bealer’s argument against Kripke is presented. We then show how Kripke could counteract it. Our idea that the identity materialist may have the possibility of explaining why type psychophysical identities only appear to be contingent (but are necessary), because we confuse the exemplified properties (one property) with the concepts that subsume them (two distinct concepts), is supported by McGinn’s and Nagel’s materialistic intuitions. It remains to be seen whether a critique of Kripke like that of Bealer runs counter to the (...) exemplified properties and the concepts that subsume them. We argue that Bealer’s criticism of Kripke does not contradict it. McGinn’s and Nagel’s intuitions support our idea. What we want to show is that, even if, from the anti-materialist side of the debate about the mind–body identity thesis, Bealer and Kripke agree on the general anti-materialist strategy but not on the strategies of phenomenological explanation (which for Bealer, Kripke neglects) and descriptivist explanation (which for Bealer is wrong), the disagreement between Bealer and Kripke still leaves open the materialist explanation of one property and two concepts. If there is an explanation for the illusion of contingency, it is quite possible that these type psychophysical identities are indeed necessary. (shrink)

L'objet des conférences ici rassemblées est de réfléchir sur les limites du dialogue entre pensée médiévale et pensée moderne en se concentrant sur une difficulté récurrente de la sémantique des propositions : la question de la référence vide, proposant ainsi une histoire des théories du signifié prépositionnel.