Abstract
What makes it interesting, and in fact challenging, to account for success in referential communication is a certain tension that arises with regard to it. Blackburn (1984) has described this tension as follows:
“... we can easily come to feel both that our understanding of referential expressions must be intimately connected with the object referred to, and also that it cannot be” (p. 302).
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As has been said in chapter 3, when I speak of ideas and of referring acts I always mean what has been called grounded ideas and grounded referring acts. Further, with regard to those grounded referring acts where re-identification is required, I assume that it is performed by the hearer.
It should be noted that the target of his article is also quite different. fleck’s aim is to argue against what he calls the hybrid view according to which the contents of the thoughts or beliefs that underlie or accompany our referential remarks are characteristically intensional whereas the meanings of such remarks are extensional, i.e., given by a singular proposition. In
call it Frege-Intuition because the examples it is based on resemble closely the ones presented by Frege in favor of the introduction of senses in his semantic theory. Yet as I will show in section 2, the examples he discusses are different in the sense that they do not concern predominantly communication but the individuation of thought contents.
Instead of translating Frege’s term “Bedeutung” by “meaning”, which prima facie would he suggested by standard dictionaries, I am adopting here Dummett’s (1973) translation because it captures more adequately Frege’s rather technical use of the term “Bedeutung” which I think is at odds with the standard use of that term in German and also with the standard use of “meaning” in English.
In the following the notions of sense and of mode of presentation will be used interchangeably.
So long as the thing meant (Bedeutung) remains the same, such variations of sense may be tolerated…
It should be noted that this problem also comes up if we individuate the sense or the singular mode of presentation associated by a subject S with a referential use of a singular term t with the satisfaction set of the underlying idea associated with t by S. Remember such a satisfaction set comprises of those properties and relations which the representations that make up the idea’s object file are of. For instance the ideas which two agents possess of the Aristotle will usually have different satisfaction sets, yet nevertheless they normally understand each other.
See again Footnote 2 in Frege (1892).
In recent years some authors have attributed to Frege the view that singular modes of presentation are identity dependent on the objects referred to. That is, without there being a referent of one’s thought there will not be a mode of presentation entertained by it and further, different modes of presentation will be entertained if different objects are referred to by the underlying thoughts. Such an interpretation of Frege has been put forward Evans (1981. 1982) and later been endorsed by McDowell (1984). Clearly, if such a view were true, then singular modes of presentation could not be employed to account for success in those empty cases where the communicating underlying thoughts do not refer to any objects; because in such
See for instance Schiffer (1990) for a nice overview of some of these different proposals.
In fact they might even associate the same pictorial representation with their rock ideas.
Evans (1982, p. 332–337) discusses the prospects of accounts of referential communication, which assume that communicative success can be explained without appealing to the idea of there being a common object referred to, but solely in terms of a correspondence in agents’ underlying thoughts. Under the assumption made here that modes of presentation are not object-dependent, such accounts correspond roughly to what 1 have called above Frege-style accounts.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Paul, M. (1999). Traditional Accounts of Success 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_5
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