On Reference Theory

Forum, Art History and its Theories, Art Bulletin 78 , 1996

2014

§1 gives a preliminary explanation of the concept of reference. §2 is an analysis of descriptivism, the first systematic theory of reference. §3 begins with criticisms of descriptivism, and then details the development of the causal-historical theory of reference, which has been the orthodox view of reference since the 1970s. §4 is an exposition of three concepts that play major roles in recent debates-skepticism, naturalism, and minimalism about reference. §5 gives a brief summary of the article (including a short list of the theories surveyed and acronyms employed). Main text §1: What is reference? Reference is the relation that obtains between a use of a linguistic expression and what it stands for or denotes. Philosophical theories of reference aim to explain this relation. They address such questions as: Can we specify necessary or sufficient conditions for a use of an expression to single out some particular referent? What makes it the case that a sequence of marks or noises refers to what it does? What grounds the conventional word-referent relations that we take for granted in the unreflective course of linguistic communication?

A. Bianchi (ed.), Language and Reality From a Naturalistic Perspective: Themes From Michael Devitt. Springer., 2020

The new theory of reference has won popularity. However, a number of noted philosophers have also attempted to reply to the critical arguments of Kripke and others, and aimed to vindicate the description theory of reference. Such responses are often based on ingenious novel kinds of descriptions, such as rigidified descriptions, causal descriptions, and metalinguistic descriptions. This prolonged debate raises doubt whether various parties really have any shared understanding of what the central question of the philosophical theory of reference is: what is the main question to which descriptivism and the causal-historical theory have presented competing answers. One aim of the paper is to clarify this issue. The most influential objections to the new theory of reference are critically reviewed. Special attention is also paid to certain important later advances in the new theory of reference, due to Devitt and others.

2008

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2009

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture . We argue that accommodating this variation within a theory of reference undermines arguments from reference.

Erkenntnis, 1978

I locate the central question of the theory of reference in the theory of propositional attitude psychology. For to know the meaning of a sentence is to know what propositional attitudes a speaker must have if he is to utter that sentence seriously and literally. And to know the meaning of a word or an expression is just to know what contributions it makes to the meanings of the sentences in which it occurs. A theory of reference is, first and foremost, a theory of the meaning of singular terms. The basis of a theory of reference must therefore be a theory of the thought in the mind of a person using a singular term; typically, this thought is a thought about the object referred to by the singular term on the particular occasion of use. So "the basis of reference is a theory of our thoughts about things; it is, to use the current jargon, a theory of de re propositional attitudes.

In "Croatian Journal of Philosophy", XIX, 57, pp. 423-448, 2019

In this paper, I focus on the alleged distinction between speaker's reference and semantic reference. I begin by discussing Saul Kripke's notion of speaker's reference and the theoretical roles it is supposed to play, arguing that they do not justify the claim that reference comes in two different sorts and highlighting that Kripke's own definition makes the notion incompatible with the nowadays widely endorsed Gricean project, which aims at explaining semantic reference in terms of speaker's reference. I then examine an alternative account of speaker's reference offered by Michael Devitt within his causal theory and express some doubts about its suitability for explaining proper name semantic reference. From all this, I conclude that there is at least some tension between Kripke's chain of communication picture and the attempt to explain (Griceanly, so to say) semantic properties in terms of speakers' mental states.

Hard-science linguistics, 2004

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2003

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