Abstract
The new theory of reference has won popularity. However, a number of noted philosophers have also attempted to reply to the critical arguments of Kripke and others, and aimed to vindicate the description theory of reference. Such responses are often based on ingenious novel kinds of descriptions, such as rigidified descriptions, causal descriptions, and metalinguistic descriptions. This prolonged debate raises doubt whether various parties really have any shared understanding of what the central question of the philosophical theory of reference is: what is the main question to which descriptivism and the causal-historical theory have presented competing answers. One aim of the paper is to clarify this issue. The most influential objections to the new theory of reference are critically reviewed. Special attention is also paid to certain important later advances in the new theory of reference, due to Devitt and others.
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Notes
- 1.
Before Donnellan and Kripke, there was no explicit school that would have identified itself as “descriptivists” (or advocates of “the description theory of reference”). Rather, Kripke, and to some extent also Donnellan, isolated and abstracted the idea from the rambling literature. Therefore, it was largely up to them to define the view they then critically scrutinized. Given the number of indignant reactions they received, it seems that they were not criticizing a straw man.
- 2.
Let us sort out one misunderstanding I have sometimes met: the suggested interpretation is emphatically not that the relevant description itself – a linguistic entity – is the sense, or the meaning, of the name. That would obviously be quite an absurd view. Rather, the idea is that the meaning is some sort of abstract or mental entity – perhaps a combination of properties, attributes or concepts – that is expressed more transparently by the associated description, which the referent uniquely satisfies: the referent has exactly those properties (or most of them).
- 3.
There is also a broader view than descriptivism that Devitt and Sterelny (1999: 62) call “the identification theory”: it allows that a speaker may not be able to describe the bearer, provided that he can recognize her; the speaker can, so to say, pick the bearer out in a lineup. This is an improvement, but does not help with names of temporally or spatially distant bearers, such as Cicero or Feynman: with all such names, the descriptivist account is (in this view) the only one possible. And the problems with ignorance and error (see below) remain relevant.
- 4.
Or, according to the cluster theory version, a larger cluster of such descriptions.
- 5.
Dummett (1973: 110), McDowell (1977), Burge (1979), Evans (1985), Noonan (2001), and Heck and May (2006), for example, have argued against interpreting Frege as a descriptivist. (Currie (1982: 170), on the other hand, defends the descriptivist interpretation.) However, the interpretation of Frege many of these critics favor is more or less the same as “the identification theory” (see note 3 above), which clearly does not save Frege’s view.
- 6.
In Naming and Necessity, Kripke called the simple version of descriptivism “the Frege-Russell view.” Devitt and Sterelny (1999: 45) write, more cautiously, of the classical description theory as “derived from the works of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell.” In his 2008 Schock prize lecture, Kripke reflects on the issue as follows: “[C]ertainly Frege, like Russell, had generally been understood in this way. This made it important for me to rebut the theory, whether historically it was Frege’s theory or not” (Kripke 2008: 208). Moreover, Kripke (1979: 271 n. 3) wrote: “In any event, the philosophical community has generally understood Fregean senses in terms of descriptions, and we deal with it under this usual understanding. For present purposes, this is more important than detailed historical issues.”
- 7.
Although neither Searle nor Strawson explicitly mentioned Wittgenstein, it is plausible to assume that Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, and the remarks on “Moses” in particular (§79), inspired this view: Kripke suggested the connection in (1980: 31). It is unclear, though, whether Wittgenstein really intended to present any sort of general theory of names, and what exactly was his true aim here; see Travis 1989 and Bridges 2010.
- 8.
My understanding of the situation in philosophy before the revolution has benefited from writings of and personal correspondence with John Burgess.
- 9.
More exactly, the expression refers to the same entity in every possible world in which that entity exists.
- 10.
Note that many of Kripke’s key critical arguments (the arguments from rigidity and from unwanted necessity and “the epistemological argument”) only make sense if descriptivism is understood as a theory of meaning. This also suggests that Kripke himself primarily thought of descriptivism in this way.
- 11.
The label “causal theory” can mislead and has misled. Even competent philosophers repeatedly interpret the causal theory as claiming that the referent is whatever causes the particular utterance of the name. That is emphatically not the idea. The cause of my utterance of, say, “Aristotle” may be, for example, my friend’s question; it is typically not Aristotle himself.
- 12.
That is, introduction as the expression with this specific reference . It is obviously possible and even common that the (syntactically) same name has already been used in the community with a different reference.
- 13.
In Searle’s words, what speakers “regard as essential and established facts” about the bearer.
- 14.
I am myself inclined, at least tentatively, to go even further: I do not think there has to be any specific intention to use that particular word with the same reference, even at the time of borrowing: perhaps all that is needed is the absence of an actual decision to begin using that name in a new way (like “Napoleon” for a pet), and a rough understanding of how proper names generally function. However, I should emphasize that this is my own personal view and not something that Kripke or Devitt, for example, would clearly state.
- 15.
Kripke adds, “But in many or most cases, I think the theses [descriptivism] are false” (Kripke 1980: 80).
- 16.
In which, by the way, Schwartz also introduced the now-common label “new theory of reference.”
- 17.
I once put this sort of division forward in a discussion with Devitt, and he more or less agreed.
- 18.
These terms are first tentatively identified with the help of their observable properties; but it is part of the idea that their extension is determined by their “inner structure,” lineage, or something else, i.e., more theoretical traits that go beyond direct observation (see Sect. 4.2.4). More theoretical natural kind terms may, rather, belong to the first two categories. Devitt (1981), for example, explicitly mentions “observational natural kinds” in this connection. More recently, some philosophers of language have begun using the term “manifest natural kinds” (e.g. Soames).
- 19.
I am well aware of the problems with the notion of “observational terms”, but I think we can use a rough and relative notion here in contrast to the other categories (1–3).
- 20.
Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definitions in Philosophical Investigations can perhaps be viewed as a predecessor of this critical argument.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
This is my own example, not Unger’s, but I think that it captures fairly the basic idea of many of his cases.
- 24.
Note that this was written some time after the critique by Kripke, Donnellan and others was published.
- 25.
- 26.
Devitt expresses the idea in virtually the same words in Designation (Devitt 1981: 6). In his much later encyclopedia entry, he writes: “The central question about reference is: In virtue of what does a term have its reference? Answering this requires a theory that explains the term’s relation to its referent” (Devitt 1998, my emphasis).
- 27.
The second is, “What is the relation between reference and meaning?”, and the third, “What is the relation between reference and truth?”.
- 28.
Accordingly, Searle begins his encyclopedia entry (Searle 1967) as well as his 1971 “Introduction” in this way. Kripke also discusses it at the beginning of his first lecture in Naming and Necessity (1980: 26–27); also Devitt begins Designation (1981: 3–6) by reflecting on the Millian view and its apparent problems. Braun (2006) begins his handbook chapter similarly, and both Reimer (2009) and Lycan (2008: ch. 3) motivate descriptivism in this same way.
- 29.
It is now quite popular to assume that the second camp, those who favor NTR, advocate the Millian view. Although some do, this assumption is generally the result of confusion , as we shall see.
- 30.
Whether or not the actual, historical Frege intended his “senses” to be linguistic meanings (or a central aspect of meaning, or something close), his arguments work beautifully with respect to linguistic meaning and have consequently become – thus interpreted – standard in the philosophical theory of meaning (see, e.g., Searle 1967, 1971; Devitt and Sterelny 1987, 1999; Braun 2006; Lycan 2008). However, the problem of empty names was in reality more central to Russell than to Frege. Four different puzzles are often mentioned, even, but I must be brief and condense here.
- 31.
That is, under some plausible assumption of compositionality or the principle of substitutivity of synonyms.
- 32.
Vulcan was the alleged directly unobservable planet scientists once postulated, orbiting between Mercury and the Sun, and causing the deviations in Mercury’s orbit. However, it turned out that there exists no such thing.
- 33.
Chalmers is not a flag-carrying descriptivist, but, rather, distances himself from descriptivism. Nevertheless, he suggests that a meaning of a description can “approximate” the meaning of the original expression (see, e.g., Chalmers 2002: 149, 160). As will become evident, I do not believe that is true.
- 34.
Everett (2005) makes essentially the same point.
- 35.
Russell, at least in his “The philosophy of logical atomism” (1918), has been a notable exception: to him, language is essentially private. This view became quite unpopular due to the criticism of the later Wittgenstein.
- 36.
There may be, for Frege, some exceptions in the case of indexicals. Moreover, Frege grants that different speakers may attach different senses to a name. But for Frege, this was more an unhappy shortcoming of natural language, something that would be eliminated in the ideal logical language. Furthermore, such a difference of senses amounted to, for Frege, speaking really different languages. Be that as it may, one should not one-sidedly exaggerate this aspect of Frege’s views on sense at the expense of just how central the objectivity and the shareablity of meaning was for him (see, e.g., May 2006; Kremer 2010).
- 37.
“Call the psychological thesis that a speaker’s understanding of a sentence consists in knowledge of its meaning the epistemic conception of understanding” (Miller 2006: 994).
- 38.
Or, strictly speaking, of the more general “identification theory”; see notes 3 and 5.
- 39.
Their “contextual theory of meaning” can be viewed as a version of descriptivism.
- 40.
Indeed, Devitt’s idea of multiple grounding (see above) provides one account of how this could happen.
- 41.
Chalmers, for example, recently granted that in his two-dimensional “broadly Fregean” approach, the senses, or intensions, “do not play the ‘public meaning’ role” (Chalmers 2012: 249). Consequently, I think it is somewhat misleading to even put that theory forward as a statement in the mainstream debate on meaning and reference (as Chalmers has repeatedly done). Chalmers, though, justifies all this with vague gestures towards Frege: that he allowed his senses to vary between different speakers as well (251). See, however, note 36 and the discussion of Frege above.
- 42.
More precisely, Dummett advocated for “the identification theory” (see note 3), but, as was noted above, in a great many cases this makes no difference.
- 43.
This view is somewhat different from and more specific than the traditional all-encompassing behaviorism and is not obviously refuted by “the standard objections to behaviorism” (as I argue in Raatikainen 2005; see especially note 47).
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
Personally, I think that possible world semantics has, in the philosophical theory of meaning, rather limited value. But some recent descriptivists attribute to it a highly central role. The following observation has some bite against such descriptivists.
- 47.
I have borrowed this observation from Cumming 2016. (The first version appeared in 2008.) I do not know whether it originated with Cumming or whether it has an earlier history, nor do I know who exactly to credit for it.
- 48.
Cf. Kripke 1980: 70: “Obviously if the only descriptive senses of names we can think of are of the form ‘the man called such and such’, ‘the man called “Walter Scott”’, ‘the man called “Socrates”’, then whatever this relation of calling is is really what determines the reference and not any description like ‘the man called “Socrates”’”. Though Kripke’s target here is more nominal or metalinguistic descriptivism (see below), his point seems to be more or less the same.
- 49.
Sometimes, however, it is counted as a version of causal descriptivism.
- 50.
Or should Chalmers’ view be classified as a version of causal descriptivism? I am not sure. In any case, his formulation is, “The person called ‘N’ by those from whom I acquired the name.”
- 51.
Recall Searle’s above-cited statement that “the standard logic textbook view” – which is simply metalinguistic descriptivism – is “obviously inadequate”.
- 52.
From the perspective of NTR this may not be unacceptable. My point here is simply to underline just how different this is from the spirit of traditional, pre-Kripkean descriptivism.
- 53.
As we have noted, Frege explicitly contended that different expressions may well have the same sense: “The same sense has different expressions in different languages or even in the same language” (Frege 1892a: 159). Furthermore, many philosophers take the apparent fact that distinct expressions may be synonymous, that is, have the same meaning, as part of the basic data that any philosophical theory of meaning should be able to explain; see e.g. Lycan 2008: 65–66, 78. Also Chalmers (2002: 139), for example, explicitly grants this possibility.
- 54.
Such line of argument is by no means original with me. I picked it up from Putnam (1988: 27). It now seems to me that Kripke (1979: 274 n. 12) is making essentially the same point. I developed the idea already in Raatikainen 2006. Everett (2005) makes more or less the same observation. The general idea of such translation arguments goes back to Church’s critique of Carnap (Church 1950).
- 55.
Metalinguistic descriptivism is typically presented explicitly only for singular names; but I assume that if it is supposed to work for general terms too (and recall that there are also Frege’s puzzles for them to be dealt with), it uses descriptions like the ones given here (details are irrelevant for the general point here).
- 56.
Often such versions use, more exactly, descriptions such as “the entity standing in relation R to my current use of the name ‘N’” or “the entity called ‘N’ by my interlocutors”.
- 57.
Jackson nevertheless says (1998: 206) that names are abbreviated descriptions; it is difficult indeed to understand what this is supposed to mean, if not that names are synonymous with descriptions.
- 58.
There is a problem with this example: as it is presented, it involves translation from Hebrew to English, and the early translations of the Bible were quite inadequate. A cleaner example would be one with a Jewish community hearing all this in the original Hebrew. I only wanted to present the example (including the words) in English for the reader’s convenience.
- 59.
Martí (1995) distinguishes between two different ideas in DRT: that the meaning (or “semantic value”) of a name is its referent, and the idea of Russellian singular propositions (in which the referent itself is a constituent of the proposition expressed). I shall focus here only on the former, less technical idea.
- 60.
I think much the same can be said about Salmon’s early work (1981), in which he states, e.g., “it is neither helpful nor illuminating to see the central issue [with DRT] as a question whether proper names have sense” (11).
- 61.
In Putnam’s case, I content myself with referring to Putnam (2001).
- 62.
That is, in sentence contexts involving metaphysical necessity or possibility.
- 63.
Kripke, however, raises some doubts as to whether the real historical Mill endorsed the latter, either.
- 64.
“Note that my view is not the genuinely preposterous view that the meaning of a name is a particular token causal link … and so is not open to Salmon’s ‘argument from subjectivity’” (Devitt 2012: 73 n. 18).
- 65.
At the 2013 Buenos Aires workshop (where both Devitt and I were present), Kripke explained that he had deleted the note simply because someone had informed him that he should have credited the idea to Devitt and not to Field.
- 66.
Earlier versions (of parts) of this paper have been presented in London, Stirling, Florence, Hamburg, Helsinki and Turku. I would like to thank those who participated in the discussions on these occasions.
I have learned about these topics more from Michael Devitt than from anyone else – first from his writings, and later also from our innumerable discussions and from our correspondence. With this little piece, I want to congratulate my good friend Michael on the occasion of his eightieth birthday and, most of all, to celebrate his momentous life’s work in philosophy.
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Raatikainen, P. (2020). Theories of Reference: What Was the Question?. In: Bianchi, A. (eds) Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 142. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_4
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