Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

The talks in this series are parts of a potential book on the metasemantics of reference. In them I explore questions concerning the issue of how the referents of a variety of expressions are fixed. The ways reference is fixed are varied, both across kinds of expressions and across examples of one same kind of expression; in some cases some kind of descriptivism is reasonable, while in others some kind of anti-descriptivism holds, for example. However, the talks (and the projected book) will seek to draw some (more or less modest) patterns of unification. For example: descriptivism is only reasonable in some localized cases where the relevant description is relatively simple, and in other cases some kind of anti-descriptivist mechanism is at work; reference to abstract kinds is feasible via ordinary mechanisms of reference fixing, despite popular eliminativist considerations to the contrary coming from the philosophies of special scientific disciplines (mathematics, chemistry, biology...); etc.