Abstract
The present chapter attempts to provide a more detailed characterization of referring acts. In the first section I will expand further on the intuitive characterization of referring acts in terms of intentions to refer an audience to particular things one has in mind. Although this characterization allows us to draw certain important distinctions, as it stands it is quite imprecise since it rests on the vague notion of “having a thing in mind”.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Reference
This latter term is borrowed from Evans (1982). Although I think that his use of the term roughly corresponds to the use I make of the term here, there are some differences which will be pointed out in later chapters.
Essentially, what Evans calls the referential feature of an expression is what others have called its linguistic meaning or character.
It should be noted that Kripke refers to these kinds of reference as speaker reference and semantic reference respectively. Given the use I have made above of the term ‘speaker reference’ this terminology is quite misleading. For in both cases do uses of expressions by speakers figure as the bearers of reference, thus they both would classify as cases of speaker reference. In order to avoid terminological confusion I will stick to the terminology chosen above and continue to use the terms ‘intended reference’ and ‘conventional reference’.
It seems plausible that in claiming there is an object referred to in referring acts we first of all mean that there is an intended referent. For what one means by the words one uses seems more relevant to communication than what one says by them, as has been argued above.
See Searle (1969) for this latter classification.
What might be said against this is that whenever a name like ‘Frege’ gets rightly used one is performing a referring act. Yet what could it mean to say that one rightly uses a referring expression, if not that one uses it with the right kind of intention, that is with a referential intention?
The uses of these terms derive from Recanati (1993). As he spells it out “a term t is type referential if and only if its meaning includes a feature … by virtue of which it indicates that there is an object x such that an utterance of G(t) is true or more generally satisfied if and only if x satisfies G().”
The notion of a singular proposition was first introduced by Kaplan (1977). Such propositions are commonly conceived as ordered pairs of the form ‹R.‹o.o', …›› where R is a n-place relation and o, o', … a sequence of n particulars.
It should be remarked that Bach assumes here that the distinction is to be sought at the level of what is meant; on the level of what is said in both cases a uniqueness proposition gets expressed.
The best that can be said is that in referentially using a definite description the speaker intends to express a singular proposition; although it has to be added that this only holds for cases of discourse about reality. Yet the central problem then will be to make more precise what is meant by saying that someone intends to express a singular proposition, without actually expressing one. What kind of mental state is he in which differs from the one which underlies the attributive uses of definite descriptions?
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Paul, M. (1999). Characterizing Referential Communication. In: Success in Referential Communication. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 80. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3181-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3181-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5322-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-3181-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive