The Referential Mechanism Of Proper Names

Each of us bears a unique name given to us at birth. When people use your name, they typically refer to you. But what is the linkage that ties a name to a person and hence allows it to refer? Li’s book approaches this question of reference empirically through the medium of referential intuitions. Building on the literature on philosophical and linguistic intuitions, she proposes a linguistic-competence-based account of referential intuitions. Subsequently, using a series of novel experiments, she investigates the variation of referential intuitions across different cultures, as well as the developmental trajectory and the underlying causes of the observed cultural differences. What she finds is that the cultural patterns of referential intuitions are already in place around age seven, and the differences are largely attributable to the distinct perspective-taking strategies favoured by easterners and westerners, rather than the moral valence of actions involved in the experimental materials. These results are taken to better support referential pluralism (in particular, the ambiguous view) than referential monism. By undertaking this fascinating research, Li’s book provides new insights into the cognitive mechanism underlying people’s referential usage of names. It will be valuable to students and scholars of linguistics, philosophy of language and experimental philosophy, and in particular, to those who research into semantic intuitions and theories of reference.

For fifty years the philosophy of language has been experiencing a stalemating conflict between the old descriptive and internalist orthodoxy (advocated by philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Searle) and the new causal-referential and externalist orthodoxy (mainly endorsed by Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan). Although the latter is dominant among specialists, the former retains a discomforting intuitive plausibility. The ultimate goal of this book is to overcome the stalemate by means of a non-naïve return to the old descriptivist-internalist orthodoxy. Concerning proper names, this means introducing second-order description-rules capable of systemizing descriptions of the proper name’s cluster to provide us with the right changeable conditions of satisfaction for its application. Such rules can explain how a proper name can become a rigid designator while remaining descriptive, disarming Kripke's and Donnellan’s main objections. In the last chapter, this new perspective is extended to indexicals in a discussion of David Kaplan’s and John Perry’s views, and of general terms, in a discussion of Hilary Putnam’s externalism.

Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science is a fascinating study of the bounds between science and language: in what sense, and of what, does science provide knowledge? Is science an instrument only distantly related to what's real? Can the language of science be used to adequately describe the truth? In this book, Jody Azziouni investigates the technology of science - the actual forging and exploiting of causal links, between ourselves and what we endeavor to know and understand.

Papers gathered in the two volumes investigate the complex relations between philosophy of language and linguistics, viewed as independent, but mutually influencing one another, disciplines. They concentrate on the ‘formal’ and ‘philosophical’ turns in the philosophy of language, initiated by Gottlob Frege, with further developments associated with the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, W.O.V. Quine, Richard Montague, Pavel Tichý, Richard Rorty. The volumes bring together contributions by philosophers, logicians and linguists, representing different theoretical orientations but united in outlining the common ground, necessary for further research in philosophy of language and linguistics. The papers were submitted and, in most cases, presented at the first International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, PhiLang2009, organized by the Chair of English and General Linguistics at the University of Lódz.

This book offers an innovative systematic approach to the problems of meaning, reference and related issues, unifying in promising ways some of the best insights, not only of exponential philosophers like Wittgenstein and Frege, but also of some influential later theorists like Michael Dummett, Ernst Tugendhat, John Searle and Donald Williams. Moreover, it exposes some main errors popularized by clever formalist-oriented philosophers, from Willard Van Orman Quine to Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. In this way, it shows how some older major approaches could regain their central importance and how the cartography of philosophy of language could be once more redrawn. The book is clearly written, and will be of interest to anyone with basic training in analytic philosophy.

This volume offers novel views on the precise relation between reference to an object by means of a linguistic expression and our mental representation of that object, long a source of debate in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. Chapters in this volume deal with our devices for singular reference and singular representation, with most focusing on linguistic expressions that are used to refer to particular objects, persons, or places. These expressions include proper names such as Mary and John; indexicals such as I and tomorrow; demonstrative pronouns such as this and that; and some definite and indefinite descriptions such as The Queen of England or a medical doctor. Other chapters examine the ways we represent objects in thought, particularly the first-person perspective and the self, and one explores a notion common to reference and representation: salience. The volume includes the latest views on these complex topics from some of the most prominent authors in the field and will be of interest to anyone working on issues of reference and representation in thought and language.

Most of the times we open our mouth to communicate, we talk about things. This can happen because (some of) the linguistic expressions we use have semantic properties that connect them to extra-linguistic entities. Thanks to these properties, they may be used by us to refer to things. Or, as we may also say, they themselves refer to things, though in certain cases they do so only relative to a context of use. But how can we characterize the semantic properties in question? What exactly is reference? Philosophers have been trying to answer these questions at least since Plato's Cratylus, but not until the last century, when language occupied center-stage in philosophy, did the problem come to be felt as really pressing. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Gottlob Frege produced an account of reference that set the stage for the contemporary discussion. Nevertheless, around 1970 a number of powerful arguments against it were produced by Saul Kripke and others. As a result, many philosophers began to look at reference from a new perspective, which highlighted the crucial role played by wordly historical facts that may be unknown to the speakers. This semantic revolution, however, left us with a number of open problems. The eighteen original essays collected in this volume deal with many of these problems, thus contributing to our understanding of the nature of reference, its role in cognition, and the place it should be given in semantic theory.