Abstract
In his seminal book “The Varieties of Reference” Evans (1982) argues for an object-dependent account of success in referential communication. Its central claim is that for genuine cases of referential communication to be successful, there must be an object which the speaker’s and hearer’s underlying thoughts both refer to. Evans believes that making sameness in mental reference a necessary condition for communicative success presents the only option one has in overcoming those problems faced by Frege-style accounts, in particular the problem of diversity. Yet as we have seen in the previous chapter, an object-dependent account of communicative success gets into trouble with two other central problems, namely the problem of communicative failure despite sameness in reference and the problem of communicative success without reference. For on the one hand, referential communication can fail despite sameness in reference and thus an object-dependent success had to be augmented by a further success condition. And on the other hand, there can be communicative success without reference to any objects, which seems to undermine such an account altogether.
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Containing such a term unless the term has a referent… To say that nothing has been said in a particular utterance is, quite generally, to say that nothing constitutes understanding the utterance.“ (p. 71) He assumes that indexicals, proper names and demonstrative terms belong to this class of Russellian singular terms.
See chapter I, section 2, for more details.
With regard to these conditions he writes: “These merely apparent sufficient [success] conditions for genuine referential communication are genuinely sufficient - and necessary - conditions for make-believe referential communicationchrw(133) ” (’VR’, p. 362)
Other authors like Parsons (1980) or Searle (1969) have proposed to account for success in cases of referential communication that occur in “discourse about fiction” or in the “let’s pretend mode of talk” by appeal to some sort of fictional or unreal objects. In the next chapter such proposals will be discussed in some more detail.
Boer (1990) gives a similar reconstruction of Evans’s argument. It differs from the one here in the sense that Boer’s focus is on demonstrative terms which for their understanding require the possession of perceptual information on the hearer’s side.
Heck (1995) in a recent article explicitly endorses such an epistemic conception, and Sainsbury (1999) in discussing Evans in a forthcoming article adheres to it as well. Yet others have also stated their reservation about this conception; for instance Byrne and Thau (1996).
Evans notes quite rightly: “Very few names which naturally occur in ordinary language can be regarded as descriptive names” (p. 48). Although in many cases there is some standard description associated with a name, for instance the description ‘the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey’ with the name ’Homer’, “it is more plausible to regard the informationchrw(133) inherited from people who used the name as an ordinary proper name, rather than manifesting the general intention to use the name to refer to whatever in fact satisfies the description” (p. 48). For more details on the notion of a descriptive name see also chapter 2, section 4.
Although Evans does not state this principle explicitly, many passages suggest that he makes tacit use of it, for instance when he writes: “chrw(133) the only candidate communication-allowing relation,chrw(133), which is discoverable in the absence of an objectchrw(133) is far too strong to impose upon referential communication in general.” (p. 335–36)
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Paul, M. (1999). Evans’ Account 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_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3181-2_6
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