Abstract
The first of the following two notes concerns the notion of a referent; the second explores an idea that became central in the field with the publication of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity: reference fixing.
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Notes
- 1.
Such “empty names,” raise a number of well-known problems, as do names in fiction. Prominent for Millians like me is the problem of the significance, the meaningfulness of reference-less names. This is a problem, or at least certainly appears to be, since Millians are fond of saying things like “the sole semantic significance of a name is its reference.” At the same time, as I discuss in Chapter 7 of The Magic Prism: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Oxford University Press, 2004), empty and fictional names had better be meaningful. We certainly use them in significant sentences. (See my criticism there of “pragmatic approaches” that deny the semantic significance of empty and fictional names.)
- 2.
“Truth” also seems subtle and complicated with respect to reports of speech, belief, and the like, as I suggest in Chapters 8 and 9 of The Magic Prism.
- 3.
I surely don’t mean to deny the utility of “identifying” the pain with some CNS event, process or whatever. “Identifications” of that sort can be of use to us even when they involve no claims about real identity, my interest here. Cf. Paul Benacceraf, “What Numbers Could Not Be,” for the distinction between questions of real identity and identifications that have utility.
- 4.
The following remarks on the development of pain vocabulary are adapted from my paper, “Terra Firma” (The Monist, October 1995, Vol. 78, Number 4, pp. 425–446).
- 5.
I hope this children’s term for pain is recognizable.
- 6.
Another interesting case is that of the indexical expression,“now.” Kaplan’s widely accepted treatment, that “now” refers to a time, raises all sorts of issues. One wants to know more about the referent, for example.
- 7.
As with Frege’s later notion of sense, thinking of senses, and ways of determining reference, as descriptive seems to capture what Frege has in mind and yet does not fit with everything he says.
- 8.
And even then there are issues. Relativize “the speaker” to a conversational context and there may be more than one speaker. Such issues are beyond my scope here.
- 9.
This is Kaplan’s Fregean side. His anti-Fregean side is represented by his Russell-inspired view of propositions as containing objects.
- 10.
By “continuing reference-fixers” I mean that competence with a name involves associating the name with such a reference-fixer.
- 11.
This brings me to another point of some importance about what I take to be, and hope is, Kripke’s picture. The question is one of the character of the chain of communication. Here I’m making use of some thoughts of David Kaplan an Joseph Almog. One might suppose that the chain of communication story of Kripke’s—he denies in conversation that he meant to emphasize “causal”—is his externalist alternative to the internalism of Frege; an externalist alternative to Frege’s internalist story of what determines reference. The semantics of the name then crucially involved the chain; the links are links, as it were, in the semantics. And one might suppose—there may be alternatives—that there is a question about what determines the reference at each link. It’s at least thinkable that at each link, the new user fixes reference, etc.
But there is an alternative I prefer. When one learns the word “table,” for example, it is implausible to suppose that the transmission of this word from one to another constitutes something internal to the semantics of the name. One is rather passing along something that is semantically whole and complete. This is of course not to deny that one can change the meaning of the word, and then something really new may happen. But barring that, the “chain” is not semantically relevant.
The idea is that names are like that. At some point the name “Aristotle” entered our practice and then its semantics was finished. Passing it from one to another is like passing the salt; like passing “table” from one to another. The chain is of interest in various ways, but it’s not an externalist link of name to referent. That link was whole and complete; if not there was nothing to pass along. If this picture has merit, then again we see that it’s a mistake to see each user as fixing reference. This would be like reinventing the wheel. It’s there already.
Question: if Kripke’s is not an externalist response—that is an explanation of the name-referent link— how does one respond to the Fregean challenge for an explanation of the link between name and reference. I’m inclined to suppose that the question is ill-framed and that the challenge withers upon analysis. I argue this in Chapter 5 of The Magic Prism.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Richard Mendelsohn for extremely helpful comments on previous drafts.
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Wettstein, H. (2019). Referents and Fixing Reference. In: Capone, A., Carapezza, M., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00973-1_6
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