Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Vagaries of Reference

Date: 15 May 2015

Time: 12:00

Place: Room 4029 (Seminari del Departament de Història de la Filosofia, Estètica i Filosofia de la Cultura)

Abstract

Sometime in the 20th century, philosophers largely abandoned the project of offering a unified theory of reference. This, I suggest, was partly the result of the temptation to handle a certain range of hard cases—involving speakers who are confused about some relevant aspect of the world—in different ways when different terms were involved. The result has been an explosion of theories of reference: one for names, another for demonstratives, yet another for pronouns, and so on. I shall argue that the resulting theories are highly unsatisfactory, and that we can in fact do better by returning to the project of offering a unified theory of reference. I conclude by sketching just such a theory, inspired by some rather cryptic remarks of Strawson’s. On reflection, these remarks shall turn out not to be so cryptic, and the theory they suggest shall turn out to be capable of explaining this variety of hard cases in a unified, but not too unified, manner.E