Accounting for Mental Reference

Abstract

Many authors have assumed that a subject can only understand the referring act of another subject if they come to entertain ideas or thoughts which refer to the same object in the world. Clearly, for evaluating the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of such object-dependent accounts of success in referential communication it has to be made more precise what it is for an idea or a thought to refer to an object in the world. For instance, what makes my thought that Bill Clinton won the 1996 presidential election about the individual Bill Clinton? Or what makes my thought that Schubert was a wonderful composer refer to Franz Schubert? There has been an ongoing debate whether such cases of mental reference, as they have been called, should be accounted for by appeal to satisfactional factors, by appeal to causal ones or possibly by appeal to both kinds of factors.¹ Accounts of mental reference which appeal to satisfactional factors and which I will call satisfactional accounts assume that an idea or thought will be of that object in the world which in some way gets distinguished or picked out by it. On the other hand, accounts of mental reference which appeal to causal factors and which I will call causal accounts suppose that a thought will be of that object which has played a certain causal role in its production. Hybrid accounts simply suggest to combine these elements in some way.