Abstract
In the previous chapter the process of successful referential communication or of understanding referring acts was described in most general terms as follows: a speaker when performing a referring act by using a referring expression t, entertains an idea which purports to represent the object that he intends to refer his audience to. On the other hand, a hearer upon encountering the speaker’s use of t and possibly upon further interacting with the speaker will, if communication succeeds, also come to entertain an idea, namely one that is related to the speaker’s idea in a certain way. Now it seems plausible that the hearer will in many cases not come to entertain a new idea in the course of this process, but he will link the speaker’s utterance to an idea which he already possesses. That is he will re-identify in some way the object the speaker intends to relate him to. Consider in this regard an utterance of the following sentence:
(1) Bill Clinton won the 1996 presidential election.
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Empirical and computational work on object-recongnition has been concerned with spelling out the exact mechanisms that account for such re-identification in perception.
Since the object one is currently perceiving might also be re-identified in the ways stated above, even more ways of re-identification can result. Yet these can be seen as sort of derived re-identifications, in the following sense: an object talked about gets re-identified as an object one is currently perceiving which in turn gets –identified as an object heard or seen before.
Such a model can be found for instance in Allen (1987), but also in much other computational work on reference-resolution as it has been called.
Seen for instance Goodman (1986) or Allen in this regard.
It should be said that Goodman (1986) acknowledges this limitation.
It should be noted that he stated this view not only with regard to indentificatory referring acts but also with regard to the introductory ones. Yet in those case the null identification constraint is supposed to be operative, “under which success of the literal goal is already sufficient for pragmatic identification”. In order to simplify the discussion I will in the following state his proposal as if it only applies to identificatory referring acts.
Heck (1995) in a recent ‘The Sence of Communication’ argues for the same aonstraint through he does not present any new argument for it.
This suggestion has been made by Andrew Woodfield in personal conversation.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Paul, M. (1999). Re-Identification in Referential Communication. In: Success in Referential Communication. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 80. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3181-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3181-2_3
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